In the episode we released a few days ago introducing Steven Pinker, we saw how this “abnormal” psychologist synthesizes knowledge through weighty tomes.
So how do those “normal” psychologists synthesize and distill knowledge?
The episode only mentioned this in passing, so here’s a little extra—a quick bit of popular science about the academic ecosystem.
In psychology (and I imagine most other fields are much the same), normal knowledge synthesis and distillation generally happen in three steps:
First, purification;
then, elevation;
and finally, compilation into a volume.
The purification step is called meta-analysis. It brings together the experimental data from dozens or even hundreds of studies investigating the same question, then uses specialized statistical methods to identify the common patterns emerging across those studies. The conclusions of individual studies sometimes clash. For example, some studies find that listening to Mozart can raise IQ, while others find that it can’t. So which is it? Meta-analysis can reveal the overall pattern once all the research data are pooled. When everything is combined, for instance, we may find that listening to Mozart actually has no effect on IQ. That conclusion filters out the noise caused by random error in individual studies, making it more reliable. In that sense, the data have effectively been “purified.”
The elevation step is called a review. What this step aims to summarize is a research topic somewhat “larger” than the one in the previous step—for example, “the effects of music on cognitive ability.” Reviews are generally written by leading scholars in the field. They analyze and synthesize the main findings under this broad topic, draw some overarching conclusions, elevate the significance of the research, and predict research trends.
If we want to synthesize knowledge under an even broader topic (say, “music psychology”), one review isn’t enough. The usual approach is for one or two of the field’s top authorities to lead the effort, organizing dozens of leading scientists into several groups. Each group has two or three scientists responsible for writing a review of a subtopic, and finally the dozens of reviews are compiled and published as a volume. These books are generally titled The XX Handbook (for example, The Handbook of Music Psychology). Although they look like books, they are actually collections of reviews co-written by authorities across the field, and important reference materials for other scholars carrying out further research.
That’s it.
Note
- This series of articles from the “Psychology New Insights Mini-Course” was written at the time as a collection of short popular-science pieces and casual essays accompanying the related content of Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Insights Course, and were published on the now-shuttered platform Fantuan. The original link no longer exists.
Leave a Reply