Illusory essences

Reference: Brick, C., et al. (2020). Illusory essences: A bias holding back theorizing in psychological science.

Abstract: The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence; attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the 'vital forces' previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. We describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena by synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, clinical, and biological psychology and neuroscience. Labeling a complex phenomenon can appear as theoretical progress before sufficient evidence that the described category has a definable essence or known boundary conditions. Category labels can further undermine progress by masking contingent and contextual relationships and obscuring the need to specify mechanisms. Finally, we highlight examples of promising methods that circumvent the lure of essences and we suggest four concrete strategies to identify and avoid essentialist intuitions in theory development.

My notes: An excellent pre-print that tackles a key problem across science and one that seriously affects many areas of design research, including cognitive studies of 'fixation' and 'ideation' and, of course, neurological studies aiming to discover "the essence of design activity". Worth a careful read. These days I usually only scan papers and would only read the section I'm most interested in (methods, literature, findings, or discussion). I enjoyed going through this paper slowly and absorbing its content, especially the well-framed challenges and questions to think about how we conduct and interpret research.