TRACKING INTELLECTUAL TRENDS IN PSYCHOLOGY
Lively polemics surround debates about the relative prominence of schools of thought in psychology. Important decisions about funding, hiring, and so on are often derived from rather personal views of "what's hot" in the field. Based on the idea that such crucial decisions should be guided by empirical evidence rather than mere speculation, my collaborators and I use empirical indices to track trends in the intellectual history of psychology. We have used multiple indicators to examine trends in the scientific prominence four widely recognized schools in psychology: Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. Our results, which replicated across all three measures of prominence, suggest: (a) psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades; (b) behavioral psychology has declined in prominence and given way to the ascension of cognitive psychology in the 1970s; (c) cognitive psychology has sustained a steady upward trajectory and continues to be the most prominent school; and (d) surprisingly, neuroscience has seen only a modest increase in prominence in mainstream psychology, despite evidence for its conspicuous growth in general.
My recent interests in this area focus on how collaboration networks influence the flow of intellectual ideas.
Collaborators: Rick Robins, Ken Craik, Jess Tracy
Representative Publications:
Robins, R. W., Gosling, S. D., & Craik, K. H. (1999). An empirical analysis of trends in psychology. American Psychologist, 54, 117-128.
Robins, R. W., Gosling, S. D., & Craik, K. H. (1998). Psychological science at the crossroads. The American Scientist, 86, 310-313.
Tracy, J. L., Robins, R. W., & Gosling, S. D. (2004). Exploring the roots of contemporary psychology: Using empirical indices to identify scientific trends. In T. C. Dalton & R. B. Evans (Eds.), The lifecycle of psychological ideas: Understanding prominence and the dynamics of intellectual change (pp. 105-130). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.