The Frontal Cortex

Via Vaughan, over at MindHacks, a great quote on the utility of social psychology from Dan Gilbert:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we've outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

I think part of that perdurability has to do with the fact that social psychologists aren't wedded to a particular experimental technique or level of analysis. Instead, they are admirably parasitic on whatever cool new technique comes along. That's why you'll see social psychologists using fMRI or collaborating on genetic studies or playing with some new experimental economics game. In this sense, social psychology has a become a force for inter-disciplinary interaction. Just look at cognitive dissonance. What began as a seminal study of a UFO cult is now recognized as a basic principle of the human brain, and has even been localized, at least in part, to certain brain structures, such as the ACC. That single idea, so obvious in retrospect, has led to a series of important cross-cutting connections.

And while some neuroscientists might dismiss social psychology as charmingly old-fashioned - isn't it quaint to be more interested in the mind than the brain? - I'd argue that social psychology remains more necessary than ever. As David Marr famously pointed out, the key to deciphering any complex information-processing device is to study the device at multiple levels. Trying to solve the brain by just studying neurons, Marr said, was like trying to "understand bird flight by studying only feathers...It just cannot be done." The aim of social psychology, then, is to study the mind in the air, to figure out how those neural feathers get the brain off the ground.*

My apologies to the late, great Marr for mucking up his metaphor.

* Of course, the same argument can also be made in defense of cognitive psychology, which seems to be in perennial danger of dissolving into cognitive neuroscience.