2 Understanding Science
Learning Objectives
- Define science.
- Describe the three fundamental features of science.
- Explain why psychology is a science.
- Define pseudoscience and give some examples.
What Is Science?
Some people are surprised to learn that psychology is a science. They generally agree that astronomy, biology, and chemistry are sciences but wonder what psychology has in common with these other fields. Before answering this question, however, it is worth reflecting on what astronomy, biology, and chemistry have in common with each other. It is clearly not their subject matter. Astronomers study celestial bodies, biologists study living organisms, and chemists study matter and its properties. It is also not the equipment and techniques that they use. Few biologists would know what to do with a radio telescope, for example, and few chemists would know how to track a moose population in the wild. For these and other reasons, philosophers and scientists who have thought deeply about this question have concluded that what the sciences have in common is a general approach to understanding the natural world. Psychology is a science because it takes this same general approach to understanding one aspect of the natural world: human behavior.
Features of Science
The general scientific approach has three fundamental features (Stanovich, 2010)[1]. The first is systematic empiricism. Empiricism refers to learning based on observation, and scientists learn about the natural world systematically, by carefully planning, making, recording, and analyzing observations of it. As we will see, logical reasoning and even creativity play important roles in science too, but scientists are unique in their insistence on checking their ideas about the way the world is against their systematic observations. Notice, for example, that Mehl and his colleagues did not trust other people’s stereotypes or even their own informal observations. Instead, they systematically recorded, counted, and compared the number of words spoken by a large sample of women and men. Furthermore, when their systematic observations turned out to conflict with people’s stereotypes, they trusted their systematic observations.
The second feature of the scientific approach—which follows in a straightforward way from the first—is that it is concerned with empirical questions. These are questions about the way the world actually is and, therefore, can be answered by systematically observing it. The question of whether women talk more than men is empirical in this way. Either women really do talk more than men or they do not, and this can be determined by systematically observing how much women and men actually talk. Having said this, there are many interesting and important questions that are not empirically testable and that science is not in a position to answer. Among these are questions about values—whether things are good or bad, just or unjust, or beautiful or ugly, and how the world ought to be. So although the question of whether a stereotype is accurate or inaccurate is an empirically testable one that science can answer, the question—or, rather, the value judgment—of whether it is wrong for people to hold inaccurate stereotypes is not. Similarly, the question of whether criminal behavior has a genetic basis is an empirical question, but the question of what actions ought to be considered illegal is not. It is especially important for researchers in psychology to be mindful of this distinction.
The third feature of science is that it creates public knowledge. After asking their empirical questions, making their systematic observations, and drawing their conclusions, scientists publish their work. This usually means writing an article for publication in a professional journal, in which they put their research question in the context of previous research, describe in detail the methods they used to answer their question, and clearly present their results and conclusions. Increasingly, scientists are opting to publish their work in open access journals, in which the articles are freely available to all – scientists and nonscientists alike. This important choice allows publicly-funded research to create knowledge that is truly public.
Publication is an essential feature of science for two reasons. One is that science is a social process—a large-scale collaboration among many researchers distributed across both time and space. Our current scientific knowledge of most topics is based on many different studies conducted by many different researchers who have shared their work publicly over many years. The second is that publication allows science to be self-correcting. Individual scientists understand that, despite their best efforts, their methods can be flawed and their conclusions incorrect. Publication allows others in the scientific community to detect and correct these errors so that, over time, scientific knowledge increasingly reflects the way the world actually is.
A good example of the self-correcting nature of science is the “Many Labs Replication Project” – a large and coordinated effort by prominent psychological scientists around the world to attempt to replicate findings from 13 classic and contemporary studies (Klein et al., 2013)[2]. One of the findings selected by these researchers for replication was the fascinating effect, first reported by Simone Schnall and her colleagues at the University of Plymouth, that washing one’s hands leads people to view moral transgressions—ranging from keeping money inside a found wallet to using a kitten for sexual arousal—as less wrong (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008)[3]. If reliable, this effect might help explain why so many religious traditions associate physical cleanliness with moral purity. However, despite using the same materials and nearly identical procedures with a much larger sample, the “Many Labs” researchers were unable to replicate the original finding (Johnson, Cheung, & Donnellan, 2013)[4], suggesting that the original finding may have stemmed from the relatively small sample size (which can lead to unreliable results) used in the original study. To be clear, at this stage we are still unable to definitively conclude that the handwashing effect does not exist; however, the effort that has gone into testing its reliability certainly demonstrates the collaborative and cautious nature of scientific progress.
For more on the replication crisis in psychology see: http://nobaproject.com/modules/the-replication-crisis-in-psychology
Science Versus Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience refers to activities and beliefs that are claimed to be scientific by their proponents—and may appear to be scientific at first glance—but are not. Consider the theory of biorhythms (not to be confused with sleep cycles or circadian rhythms that do have a scientific basis). The idea is that people’s physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities run in cycles that begin when they are born and continue until they die. Allegedly, the physical cycle has a period of 23 days, the intellectual cycle a period of 33 days, and the emotional cycle a period of 28 days. So, for example, if you had the option of when to schedule an exam, you would want to schedule it for a time when your intellectual cycle will be at a high point. The theory of biorhythms has been around for more than 100 years, and you can find numerous popular books and websites about biorhythms, often containing impressive and scientific-sounding terms like sinusoidal wave and bioelectricity. The problem with biorhythms, however, is that scientific evidence indicates they do not exist (Hines, 1998)[5].
A set of beliefs or activities can be said to be pseudoscientific if (a) its adherents claim or imply that it is scientific but (b) it lacks one or more of the three features of science. For instance, it might lack systematic empiricism. Either there is no relevant scientific research or, as in the case of biorhythms, there is relevant scientific research but it is ignored. It might also lack public knowledge. People who promote the beliefs or activities might claim to have conducted scientific research but never publish that research in a way that allows others to evaluate it.
A set of beliefs and activities might also be pseudoscientific because it does not address empirical questions. The philosopher Karl Popper was especially concerned with this idea (Popper, 2002)[6]. He argued more specifically that any scientific claim must be expressed in such a way that there are observations that would—if they were made—count as evidence against the claim. In other words, scientific claims must be falsifiable. The claim that women talk more than men is falsifiable because systematic observations could reveal either that they do talk more than men or that they do not. As an example of an unfalsifiable claim, consider that many people who believe in extrasensory perception (ESP) and other psychic powers claim that such powers can disappear when they are observed too closely. This makes it so that no possible observation would count as evidence against ESP. If a careful test of a self-proclaimed psychic showed that she predicted the future at better-than-chance levels, this would be consistent with the claim that she had psychic powers. But if she failed to predict the future at better-than-chance levels, this would also be consistent with the claim because her powers can supposedly disappear when they are observed too closely.
Why should we concern ourselves with pseudoscience? There are at least three reasons. One is that learning about pseudoscience helps bring the fundamental features of science—and their importance—into sharper focus. A second is that biorhythms, psychic powers, astrology, and many other pseudoscientific beliefs are widely held and are promoted on the Internet, on television, and in books and magazines. Far from being harmless, the promotion of these beliefs often results in great personal toll as, for example, believers in pseudoscience opt for “treatments” such as homeopathy for serious medical conditions instead of empirically-supported treatments. Learning what makes them pseudoscientific can help us to identify and evaluate such beliefs and practices when we encounter them. A third reason is that many pseudosciences purport to explain some aspect of human behavior and mental processes, including biorhythms, astrology, graphology (handwriting analysis), and magnet therapy for pain control. It is important for students of psychology to distinguish their own field clearly from this “pseudo psychology.”
The Skeptic’s Dictionary
An excellent source for information on pseudoscience is The Skeptic’s Dictionary (http://www.skepdic.com). Among the pseudoscientific beliefs and practices you can learn about are the following:
- Cryptozoology. The study of “hidden” creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and the chupacabra.
- Pseudoscientific psychotherapies. Past-life regression, rebirthing therapy, and bioscream therapy, among others.
- Homeopathy. The treatment of medical conditions using natural substances that have been diluted sometimes to the point of no longer being present.
- Pyramidology. Odd theories about the origin and function of the Egyptian pyramids (e.g., that they were built by extraterrestrials) and the idea that pyramids, in general, have healing and other special powers.
Another excellent online resource is Neurobonkers (http://neurobonkers.com), which regularly posts articles that investigate claims that pertain specifically to psychological science.
- Stanovich, K. E. (2010). How to think straight about psychology (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. ↵
- Klein, R. A., Ratliff, K. A., Vianello, M., Adams, R. B., Bahník, S., Bernstein, M. J., . . . Nosek, B. A. (2013). Investigating variation in replicability: A “many labs” replication project. Social Psychology, 45(3), 142-152. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000178 ↵
- Schnall, S., Benton, J., & Harvey, S. (2008). With a clean conscience: Cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1219-1222. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02227.x ↵
- Johnson, D. J., Cheung, F., & Donnellan, M. B. (2013). Does cleanliness influence moral judgments? A direct replication of Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008). Social Psychology, 45(3), 209-215. doi: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000186 ↵
- Hines, T. M. (1998). Comprehensive review of biorhythm theory. Psychological Reports, 83, 19–64. ↵
- Popper, K. R. (2002). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge. ↵
Learning Objectives
- Describe and discuss four important reasons why students should care about social scientific research methods
- Identify how social workers use research as part of evidence-based practice
At this point, you may be wondering about the relevance of research methods to your life. Whether or not you choose to become a social worker, you should care about research methods for two basic reasons: (1) research methods are regularly applied to solve social problems and issues that shape how our society is organized, thus you have to live with the results of research methods every day of your life, and (2) understanding research methods will help you evaluate the effectiveness of social work interventions, which is an important skill for future employment.
Consuming research and living with its results
Another New Yorker cartoon depicts two men chatting with each other at a bar. One is saying to the other, “Are you just pissing and moaning, or can you verify what you’re saying with data?” (https://condenaststore.com/featured/are-you-just-pissing-and-moaning-edward-koren.html). Think about yourself: Would you rather be a complainer or someone who can verify what they say? Understanding research methods and how they work can help position you to actually do more than just complain. Further, whether you know it or not, research probably has some impact on your life each and every day. Many of our laws, social policies, and court proceedings are grounded in some degree of empirical research and evidence (Jenkins & Kroll-Smith, 1996). [1] That’s not to say that all laws and social policies are good or make sense. However, you can’t have an informed opinion about any of them without understanding where they come from, how they were formed, and what their evidence base is. All social workers, from micro to macro, need to understand the root causes and policy solutions to social problems that their clients are experiencing.
A recent lawsuit against Walmart provides an example of social science research in action. A sociologist named Professor William Bielby was enlisted by plaintiffs in the suit to conduct an analysis of Walmart’s personnel policies in order to support their claim that Walmart engages in gender discriminatory practices. Bielby’s analysis shows that Walmart’s compensation and promotion decisions may indeed have been vulnerable to gender bias. In June 2011, the United States Supreme Court decided against allowing the case to proceed as a class-action lawsuit (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 2011). [2] While a class-action suit was not pursued in this case, consider the impact that such a suit against one of our nation’s largest employers could have on companies and their employees around the country and perhaps even on your individual experience as a consumer. [3]
In addition to having to live with laws and policies that have been crafted based on social science research, you are also a consumer of all kinds of research. A strong understanding of research methods can help you be a more informed consumer. Have you ever noticed the magazine headlines that peer out at you while you are waiting in line to pay for your groceries? They are geared toward piquing your interest and making you believe that you will learn a great deal if you follow the advice in a particular article. However, since you would have no way of knowing whether the magazine’s editors had gathered their data from a representative sample of people like you and your friends, you would have no reason to believe that the advice would be worthwhile. By having some understanding of research methods, you can avoid wasting your money on magazines and avoid wasting your time on inappropriate advice.
If you were to pick up any magazine or newspaper or tune into any news broadcast, you are likely to hear about some new and exciting research results. A strong understanding of research methods will help you to read past the type of vague headlines and ask clarifying questions about what you see and hear in the media. In other words, research methods can help you to become a more responsible consumer of public and popular information. Who wouldn’t want to be more responsibly informed?
Evidence-based practice
At some point in your schooling, I am sure that you have felt as though a class was not relevant and found yourself wondering when you’ll ever need the information in “real life.” You may not believe me, but the research methods from this text will be used often in your careers. Social work supervisors and administrators at agency-based settings will likely have to demonstrate that their agency’s programs are effective at achieving their goals. Most private and public grants will require evidence of effectiveness for your agency to receive funding and to keep the programs running. Social workers at community-based organizations commonly use research methods to target their interventions to the needs of their service area. Clinical social workers must also make sure that the interventions they use in practice are effective and not harmful to clients. In addition, social workers may want to track client progress on goals, help clients gather data about their clinical issues, or use data to advocate for change. As a whole, all social workers in all practice situations must remain current on the scientific literature to ensure competent and ethical practice.
In all of these cases, a social worker needs to be able to understand and evaluate scientific information. Evidence-based practice (EBP) for social workers involves making decisions on how to help clients based on the best available evidence. A social worker must examine the current literature and understand both the theory and evidence relevant to the practice situation. According to Rubin and Babbie (2017), [4] EBP also involves understanding client characteristics, using practice wisdom and existing resources, and adapting to environmental context. It is not simply “doing what the literature says,” but rather a process by which practitioners examine the literature, client, self, and context to inform interventions with clients and systems. As we discussed in Section 1.2, the patterns discovered by scientific research are not perfectly applicable to all situations. Instead, we rely on the critical thinking of social workers to apply scientific knowledge to real-world situations.
Let’s consider an example of a social work administrator at a children’s mental health agency. The agency uses a private grant to fund a program that provides low-income children with bicycles, teaches the children how to repair and care for their bicycles, and leads group bicycle outings after school. Physical activity has been shown to improve mental health outcomes in scientific studies, but is this social worker’s program improving mental health in their clients? Ethically, the social worker should make sure that the program is achieving its goals. If the program is not beneficial, the resources should be spent on more effective programs. Practically, the social worker will also need to demonstrate to the agency’s donors that bicycling truly helps children deal with their mental health concerns.
The example above demonstrates the need for social workers to engage in evaluation research, or research that evaluates the outcomes of a policy or program. She will choose from many acceptable ways to investigate program effectiveness, and those choices are based on the principles of scientific inquiry you will learn in this textbook. As the example above mentions, evaluation research is embedded into the funding of nonprofit, human service agencies. Government and private grants need to make sure their money is being spent wisely. If your program does not work, then the funds will be allocated to a program that has been proven effective or a new program that may be effective. Just because a program has the right goal doesn’t mean it will actually accomplish that goal. Grant reporting is an important part of agency-based social work practice. Agencies, in a very important sense, help us discover what approaches actually help clients.
In addition to engaging in evaluation research to satisfy the requirements of a grant, your agency may also engage in evaluation research to validate a new approach to treatment. Innovation in social work is incredibly important. Sam Tsemberis relates an “aha” moment from his practice in this Ted talk on homelessness (https://youtu.be/HsFHV-McdPo). As a faculty member at the New York University School of Medicine, he noticed a problem with people cycling in and out of the local psychiatric hospital wards. Clients would arrive in psychiatric crisis, become stable with the help of medical supervision, and end up back in the psychiatric crisis ward shortly after discharge. When he asked the clients what their issues were, they said they were unable to participate in homelessness programs because they were not always compliant with medication for their mental health diagnosis and they continued to use drugs and alcohol. Collaboratively, the problem facing these clients was defined as a homelessness service system that was unable to meet clients where they were. Clients who were unwilling to remain completely abstinent from drugs and alcohol or who did not want to take psychiatric medications were simply cycling in and out of psychiatric crisis, moving from the hospital to the street and back to the hospital.
The solution that Sam Tsemberis implemented and popularized was called Housing First. It is an approach to homelessness prevention that starts by, you guessed it, providing people with housing first. Like Tanya Tull’s approach to address child and family homelessness, Tsemberis created a model to address chronic homelessness in people with co-occurring disorders (substance abuse and mental illness). The Housing First model holds that housing is a human right, one that should not be denied based on substance use or mental health diagnosis. Clients are given housing as soon as possible. The Housing First agency provides wraparound treatment from an interdisciplinary team, including social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, and former clients who are in recovery. Over the past few decades, this program has gone from one program in New York City to the program of choice for federal, state, and local governments seeking to address homelessness in their communities.
The main idea behind Housing First is that once clients have an apartment of their own, they are better able to engage in mental health and substance abuse treatment. While this approach may seem logical to you, it is backwards from the traditional homelessness treatment model. The traditional approach began with the client stopping drug and alcohol use and taking prescribed medication. Only after clients achieved these goals were they offered group housing. If the client remained sober and medication compliant, they could then graduate towards less restrictive individual housing.
Evaluation research helps practitioners establish that their innovation is better than the alternatives and should be implemented more broadly. By comparing clients who were served through Housing First and traditional treatment, Tsemberis could establish that Housing First was more effective at keeping people housed and progressing on mental health and substance abuse goals. Starting first with smaller studies and graduating to much larger ones, Housing First built a reputation as an effective approach to addressing homelessness. When President Bush created the Collaborative Initiative to Help End Chronic Homelessness in 2003, Housing First was used in many of the interventions and its effectiveness was demonstrated on a national scale. In 2007, it was acknowledged as an evidence-based practice in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Policies (NREPP). [5]
I suggest browsing around the NREPP website (https://nrepp.samhsa.gov/landing.aspx) and looking for interventions on topics that interest you. Other sources of evidence-based practices include the Cochrane Reviews digital library (http://www.cochranelibrary.com/) and Campbell Collaboration (https://campbellcollaboration.org/). In the next few chapters, we will talk more about how to find literature about interventions in social work. The use of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and randomized controlled trials are particularly important in this regard.
So why share the story of Housing First? Well, I want you think about what you hope to contribute to our knowledge on social work practice. What is your bright idea and how can it change the world? Practitioners innovate all the time, often incorporating those innovations into their agency’s approach and mission. Through the use of research methods, agency-based social workers can demonstrate to policymakers and other social workers that their innovations should be more widely used. Without this wellspring of new ideas, social services would not be able to adapt to the changing needs of clients. Social workers in agency-based practice may also participate in research projects happening at their agency. Partnerships between schools of social work and agencies are a common way of testing and implementing innovations in social work. Clinicians receive specialized training, clients receive additional services, agencies gain prestige, and researchers can study how an intervention works in the real world.
While you may not become a scientist in the sense of wearing a lab coat and using a microscope, social workers must understand science in order to engage in ethical practice. In this section, we reviewed many ways in which research is a part of social work practice, including:
- Determining the best intervention for a client or system
- Ensuring existing services are accomplishing their goals
- Satisfying requirements to receive funding from private agencies and government grants
- Testing a new idea and demonstrating that it should be more widely implemented
Key Takeaways
- Whether we know it or not, our everyday lives are shaped by social scientific research.
- Understanding research methods is important for competent and ethical social work practice.
- Understanding social science and research methods can help us become more astute and more responsible consumers of information.
- Knowledge about social scientific research methods is important for ethical practice, as it ensures interventions are based on evidence.
Glossary
Evaluation research- research that evaluates the outcomes of a policy or program
Evidence-based practice- making decisions on how to help clients based on the best available evidence
Image Attributions
A peer counselor with mother by US Department of Agriculture CC-BY-2.0
Homeless man in New York 2008 by JMSuarez CC-BY-2.0
Learning Objectives
- Reflect on how we know what to do as social workers
- Differentiate between micro-, meso-, and macro-level analysis
- Describe intuition, its purpose in social work, and its limitations
- Identify specific types of cognitive biases and how the influence thought
- Define scientific inquiry
What would you do?
Imagine you are a clinical social worker at a children’s mental health agency. Today, you receive a referral from your town’s middle school about a client who often skips school, gets into fights, and is disruptive in class. The school has suspended him and met with the parents multiple times. They report that they practice strict discipline at home, yet the client’s behavior has only gotten worse. When you arrive at the school to meet with the boy, you notice that he has difficulty maintaining eye contact with you, appears distracted, and has a few bruises on his legs. You also find out that he is a gifted artist, so you decide to paint and draw together while you assess him.
- Given the strengths and challenges you notice, what interventions would you select for this client and how would you know your interventions worked?
Imagine you are a social worker in an urban food desert, a geographic area in which there is no grocery store that sells fresh food. Many of your low-income clients live solely on food from the dollar store, convenience stores, or takeout, as they are unable to buy fresh food. You are becoming concerned about your clients’ health, as many of them are obese due to these conditions. Many of your clients survive on minimum wage jobs or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and end up relying on food pantries when their money runs out towards the end of the month. You have spent the past month building a coalition composed of members from your community, including non-profit agencies, religious groups, and healthcare workers to lobby your city council.
- How should your group address the issue of food deserts in your community? What intervention would you suggest? How would you know if your intervention worked?
You are a social worker working at a public policy center focused on homelessness. Your city is seeking a large federal grant to address the growing problem of homelessness in your area, and you have been hired as a consultant to work on the proposal. After conducting a needs assessment in collaboration with local social service agencies and interviewing people who are homeless, you meet with city council members to discuss potential programs. Local agencies want to spend the grant money to increase capacity at existing shelters and to create transitional housing by re-purposing an unused apartment complex. This way, individuals have a place to stay after the shelter where they can learn valuable independent living skills. On the other hand, you are aware that the clients would prefer to receive housing vouchers to rent apartments in the community. The clients also communicated that they fear shelters and transitional housing may impose on their daily lives by placing restrictions on guests and mandating quiet hours. When you ask the agencies about client feedback, they state that clients cannot be trusted to manage in their own apartments without the structure and supervision that is provided by agency support workers.
- What kind of program should your city choose to implement? Which program is most likely to be effective?
Assuming you've taken a social work course before, you will notice that the case studies cover different levels of analysis in the social ecosystem—micro, meso, and macro. At the micro-level, social workers examine the smallest levels of interaction, even interactions within “the self,” like in our first case study involving the misbehaving child. When social workers investigate groups and communities, such as our food desert scenario in case 2, they are operating at the meso-level. At the macro-level, social workers examine social structures and institutions. Research at the macro-level examines large-scale patterns, including culture and government policy, like the situation described in case 3. These domains interact with one another and it is common for a social work research project to address more than one level of analysis. Moreover, research that occurs on one level is likely to have implications at the other levels of analysis.
How do social workers know what to do?
Welcome to social work research. This chapter begins with three problems that social workers might face in practice and three questions about what a social worker should do next. If you haven’t already, spend a minute or two thinking about how you would respond to each case and jot down some notes. How would you respond to each of these cases?
I assume it is unlikely that you are an expert in the areas of children’s mental health, community responses to food deserts, and homelessness policy. Not to worry, neither am I. In fact, for many of you this textbook will likely come at an early point in your social work education, so it may seem unfair for me to ask you what the right answers are. And to disappoint you further, this course will not teach you the right answers to these questions, however it will teach you how to work through them and come to the right answer on your own. Social workers must learn how to examine the literature on a topic, come to a reasoned conclusion, and use that knowledge in their practice. Similarly, social workers engage in research to ensure that their interventions are helping, not harming, clients and that those interventions also contribute to social science and social justice.
Assuming that you may lack advanced knowledge of the topics addressed in the case studies, you likely made use of your intuition when imagining how you would react in each situation (Cheung, 2016). [6] Intuition is a way of knowing that is mostly unconscious, much like a gut feeling telling you what you should do. As you think about a problem such as those in the case studies, you notice certain details and ignore others. Using your past experiences, you apply knowledge that seems to be relevant and make predictions about what might be true.
In this way, intuition is based on direct experience. Many of us know things simply because we’ve experienced them directly. For example, you would know that electric fences can be pretty dangerous and painful if you touched one while standing in a puddle of water. Most of us can probably recall a time when we have learned something though experience. If you grew up in Minnesota, you would observe plenty of kids learning that your tongue really does stick to a metal pole in the winter. Similarly, you would learn that driving 20 miles above the speed limit on a major highway is a pretty easy way to earn a traffic ticket.
Intuition and direct experience are powerful forces. As a discipline, social work is unique because it values intuition, however it will take you quite a while to develop what social workers refer to as practice wisdom. Practice wisdom is the "learning by doing" that develops as one practices social work over time. Social workers also reflect on their practice, both independently and with colleagues, which sharpens their intuitions and opens their minds to other viewpoints. While your direct experience in social work may be limited at this point, feel confident that through reflective practice you will attain practice wisdom.
However, it’s important to note that intuitions are not always correct. Think back to the first case study. What might be your novice diagnosis for this child’s behavior? Does he have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) because he is easily distracted and gets into trouble at school, or are those symptoms of autism spectrum disorder or an attachment disorder? Are the bruises on his legs an indicator of ADHD, or do they indicate possible physical abuse at home? Even if you arrived at an accurate assessment of the situation, you would still need to figure out what kind of intervention to use with the client. If he has a mental health issue, you might suggest therapy for the child, but what kind of therapy? Should we use cognitive-behavioral therapy, play therapy, art therapy, family therapy, or animal assisted therapy? Should we try a combination of therapy and medication prescribed by a psychiatrist?
We could guess which intervention would be best, but in practice that would be highly unethical. An incorrect guess could waste our time and the time of our client, or worse, it could actively harm a client. We need to ground our social work interventions with clients and systems with something more secure than our intuition and experience.
Cognitive biases
Although the human mind is a marvel of observation and data analysis, there are universal flaws in thinking that must be overcome. We all rely on mental shortcuts to help us make sense of a continuous stream of new information. All people, including you and I, must train their minds to be aware of predictable flaws in thinking, termed cognitive biases. Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on cognitive biases. As you can see, it is quite long. We will review some of the most important ones here, but take a moment to browse around the link and get a sense of the extent to which cognitive biases are ingrained in human thinking.
The most important cognitive bias for social scientists to be aware of is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias involves observing and analyzing information in a way that confirms what you already think is true. No person is a blank slate. We arrive at each moment with a set of beliefs, experiences, and models of how the world works that we develop over time. Often, these are grounded in our own personal experiences. Confirmation bias assumes these intuitions are correct and ignores or manipulates new information in a way that avoids challenging our established beliefs.
Confirmation bias can be seen in many ways. Sometimes, people will only pay attention to the information that fits their preconceived ideas and ignore information that does not fit. This is called selective observation. Other times, people will make hasty conclusions about a broad pattern based on only a few observations. This is called overgeneralization. Let’s walk through an example and see how they each would function.
In our second case study, we are trying to figure out how to help people who receive SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) who live in a food desert. Let’s say that we have arrived at a solution and are now lobbying the city council to implement it. There are many people who have negative beliefs about people who are “on welfare.” These people believe individuals who receive social welfare benefits spend their money irresponsibly, are too lazy to get a job, and manipulate the system to maintain or increase their government payout. People expressing this belief may provide an example like Louis Cuff, who bought steak and lobster with his SNAP benefits and resold them for a profit.
City council members who hold these beliefs may ignore the truth about your client population. Your clients and other people experiencing poverty usually spend their money responsibly and they genuinely need help accessing fresh and healthy food. This would be an example of selective observation in which they are only paying attention to the cases that confirm their biased beliefs about people in poverty and ignoring evidence that challenges that perspective. Their beliefs are likely grounded in overgeneralization in which one example, like Mr. Cuff, is applied broadly to the population of people using social welfare programs. Social workers in this situation would have to hope that city council members are open to another perspective and can be swayed by evidence that challenges their beliefs. Otherwise, they will continue to rely on a biased view of people in poverty when they create policies.
But where do these beliefs and biases come from? Perhaps an authority figure told them that people in poverty are lazy and manipulative, and these beliefs may have been internalized without questioning. Naively relying on authority can take many forms. We might rely on our parents, friends, or religious leaders as authorities on a topic. We might consult someone who identifies as an expert in the field and simply follow what they say. We might hop aboard a “bandwagon” and adopt the fashionable ideas and theories of our peers and friends.
It is important to note that experts in the field should generally be trusted to provide accurate information on a topic, though their knowledge should be receptive to skeptical critique, as the state of knowledge will develop over time as more scholars study the topic. There are limits to skepticism, however. Disagreeing with experts about global warming, the shape of the earth, or the efficacy and safety of vaccines does not make one free of cognitive biases. On the contrary, it is likely that the person is falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which unskilled people overestimate their ability to find the truth. As this comic illustrates, they are at the top of Mount Stupid. Only through rigorous, scientific inquiry can they progress down the back slope and hope to increase their depth of knowledge about a topic.
Scientific Inquiry
Cognitive biases are most often expressed when people are using informal observation. Until I asked at the beginning of this chapter, you may have had little reason to formally observe and make sense of information about children’s mental health, food deserts, or homelessness policy. Because you engaged in informal observation, it is more likely that you will express cognitive biases in your responses. Informal observation can be problematic because without any systemic process for observing or addressing the accuracy of our observations, we can never be sure of their accuracy. In order to minimize the effect of cognitive biases and come closer to truly understanding a topic, we must apply a systematic framework for understanding what we observe.
The opposite of informal observation is scientific inquiry, used interchangeably with the term research methods in this text. These terms refer to an organized, logical way of knowing that involves both theory and observation. Science can account for many of the limitations of cognitive biases, though not perfectly. Science ensures that observations are done rigorously by following a set of prescribed steps in which scientists clearly describe the methods they use to conduct observations and create theories about the social world. Theories are tested by observing the social world, and they can be shown to be false or incomplete. In short, scientists try to learn the truth. Social workers use scientific truths in their practice and conduct research to revise and extend our understanding of what is true in the social world. Social workers who ignore science and act based on biased or informal observation may actively harm clients.
Key Takeaways
- Social work research occurs on the micro-, meso-, and macro-level.
- Intuition is a powerful, though woefully incomplete, guide to action in social work.
- All human thought is subject to cognitive biases.
- Scientific inquiry accounts for cognitive biases by applying an organized, logical way of observing and theorizing about the world.
Glossary
Authority- learning by listening to what people in authority say is true
Cognitive biases- predictable flaws in thinking
Confirmation bias- observing and analyzing information in a way that confirms what you already think is true
Direct experience- learning through informal observation
Dunning-Kruger effect- when unskilled people overestimate their ability and knowledge (and experts underestimate their ability and knowledge)
Intuition- your "gut feeling" about what to do
Macro-level- examining social structures and institutions
Meso-level- examining interaction between groups
Micro-level- examining the smallest levels of interaction, usually individuals
Overgeneralization- using limited observations to make assumptions about broad patterns
Practice wisdom- “learning by doing” that guides social work intervention and increases over time
Research methods- an organized, logical way of knowing based on theory and observation
Image Attributions
Thinking woman by Free-Photos via Pixabay CC-0
Light bulb by MasterTux via Pixabay CC-0