In 2015, science writer Ben Goldacre published a book called I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That. This title neatly sums up a fundamental point about psychology. There are no black and white ‘right’ answers, and questions about human behaviour should always be considered from a viewpoint of ‘it depends’. Psychology students sometimes find this incredibly frustrating. They want ‘correct’ answers that they can learn, and find it hard to present psychological research and theory in a way which covers the possibility that it might all be wrong.
At a recent A-level psychology conference, Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam (lead researchers in the BBC prison experiment) took great pains to argue that much of what we think we know about destructive human behaviour, as illustrated by the classic work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, may in fact be wrong. And that’s OK — that’s the point of science. A theory is only scientific if it’s falsifiable, i.e. can be proven wrong. So we shouldn’t be surprised that many psychological theories, and studies, have problems that shouldn’t be ignored.
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