Skip to main content

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1397553
This article is part of the Research Topic Critical Debates on Quantitative Psychology and Measurement: Revived and Novel Perspectives on Fundamental Problems View all 13 articles

The hidden complexity of the simple world of basic experimental psychology: The principal and practical limits of gaining psychological knowledge using the experimental method

Provisionally accepted
Christof Kuhbandner Christof Kuhbandner *Roland Mayrhofer Roland Mayrhofer
  • Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Basic experimental research in psychology is based on the assumption that law-like behavior can be observed if the complexity of the human psyche is reduced by the creation of experimental settings in which simple psychical phenomena occur which reflect the effect of an isolated psychological mechanism. However, we show that this assumption does not hold for many phenomena studied in basic experimental psychology because even phenomena that are regarded as simple and fully controllable often fluctuate unpredictably as a function of unintentionally chosen details of the experimental setting. The reason is that in a complex system like the human psyche, even minimal, and from the perspective of the investigated research question irrelevant, differences in the experimental setting can build up to large unsystematic effects. Law-like behavior in experiments could only occur if truly low-level mechanisms were studied in a truly isolated way. However, this is often not the case in current experimental research. One problem is that often fuzzy theoretical terms are used which only give the impression that low-level mechanisms are being investigated, although in reality the complexity of the human psyche is unintentionally brought on board. Another problem is that, unlike in the natural sciences, the mechanisms of the human psyche can only be isolated from each other to a limited extent because the human psyche always reacts as a whole system. If such problems could be overcome, meaningful knowledge could be gained through experimental psychological research. However, the knowledge gained is very limited in terms of its explanatory power for human behavior, as it is only helpful for understanding a very specific aspect of behavior, namely the mechanistic functioning of isolated low-level mechanisms. When it comes to understanding motivated behavior in real life, knowledge about the non-mechanistic functioning of the higher levels of the human psyche is necessary, but this knowledge cannot be gained through the experimental method.

    Keywords: experimental psychology, Experimental method, methodology, replication crisis, epistemology

    Received: 08 Mar 2024; Accepted: 04 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kuhbandner and Mayrhofer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Christof Kuhbandner, Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.