Recognition of the centrality of science and technology to almost all domains of human activity has given rise to subdisciplines such as philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, sociology of knowledge, and history of science and technology. Recent years are witness to the emergence of prominent interdisciplines such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) that offer systematic investigation of the dynamic relationships between science, technology, and human life. Somewhat surprisingly, the discipline of psychology has been comparatively marginal to STS and related research. There are three main markers of its marginality. First, with some notable exceptions, psychology has not been prominent as an object of study within STS, which instead has focused more on an investigation of the natural sciences. Of course, the critical scrutiny of psychological science has contributed to the emergence of subdisciplines within psychology, including theoretical psychology, critical psychology, and feminist psychology, but interface between these efforts and STS have been minimal. Second, psychology as a scholarly discipline with a distinct analytic lens has been underrepresented in the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary efforts of STS. Third, although we may identify a literature associated with the label psychology of science, that is, the psychological study of science and technology, as a focus of research it has arguably remained quite marginal to the discipline of psychology itself.
Previous attempts to articulate and develop a psychology of science and technology have not had much influence in the larger STS community. As we argue in more detail below, one reason for this is that these previous attempts have tended to have a rigid commitment to an unreflexive epistemology that does not allow for historical, critical, constructionist, qualitative, and theoretical scholarship. In contrast, STS quite explicitly draws on a plurality of disciplines and scholarly approaches, and very notably interrogates the limits of the scientific onto-epistemologies of western modernity (e.g., Latour, 1993b). Certainly, important historical work on cognitive practices of scientists using interpretive methods helped to carve out a distinct subspecialty of cognitive studies of science, beginning in the 1980s (e.g., Nersessian, 1984; Tweney, 1989), and there has been a great deal of important critical historical analysis of scientific practices specifically relevant to psychological science (e.g., Danziger, 1994; Gergen, 1973; Koch & Leary, 1992; Morawski, 1988). More recently, qualitative methods have been used to explore themes broadly relevant to social and cognitive processes in science on the part of a growing empirical philosophy of science community (see Wagenknecht, Nersessian, & Andersen, 2015). However, the relation of these efforts and the interpretive methods used to a broader project of psychology of science have not been articulated in the formal calls for a subfield to be explicitly associated with the label “psychology of science” (e.g., Feist & Gorman, 2013). Presumably, then, psychological contributions to STS, or studies of the psychological dimensions of science, if they are to be compatible with the spirit and practice of STS, would need to exhibit a reflexivity and plurality of scholarly frameworks, approaches, and methods. This book is aimed precisely at addressing this need.
By way of introduction, we situate our project in the broader context of (1) psychological studies of science and (2) psychological studies of technology, and (3) psychological contributions to STS.
Psychological Studies of Science
Any story told about the origin and development of “psychology of science” reflects assumptions about the nature of history, psychology, and science, and about their interrelations, thus complicating the task of situating our current project. An important first task is to distinguish (1) a formal scholarly specialty identified by the name “psychology of science” and (2) empirical and theoretical analysis of science not explicitly identified as “psychology of science” that nevertheless addresses broadly psychological concerns. In the case of the latter, there are several tributaries, each of which in their own right would require extensive review to even begin to do them justice. We can consider these the narrow and broad senses of psychology of science, respectively. Greg Feist makes this distinction in his effort to summarize and schematize the enormous set of contributions that could be considered part of the overall project of psychology of science. His work, singly (2006) and in combination with Gorman (e.g., Feist & Gorman, 1998, 2013), offers comprehensive and detailed historical survey, as does Simonton (1988). Campbell (1989) and Houts (1989) conducted comprehensive historical analyses of the philosophical underpinnings of psychology of science in the pioneering Psychology of Science: Contributions to Metascience (Gholson, Shadish, Neimeyer, & Houts, 1989). Here we are able only to offer a sketch of both the broad and narrow sense, drawing in part from Feist’s history but also adding some thoughts of our own. Our sketch is intended only to invite further reading and conversation, especially around the question of the appropriate demarcation and units of analysis of which a psychology of science is inclusive. We should note regretfully that our summary covers only North American and European psychology and science, owing only to our limitations in space and expertise.
Philosophical Studies of Science
Most fundamentally, it is important to first recognize that epistemology itself as historically unfolded is a kind of psychology of science. From Plato forward disagreement concerning the origin of knowledge focused on which human capacity can be trusted as the basis for knowledge claims, with the primacy of intellectual powers pitted against the rock bottom importance of sensory channels. The emergence of modern science is also defended philosophically on grounds that are at least in some aspects “psychological”, if by psychological we would include the forms of bias to which our everyday reasoning is prone. For example, against the rapid expansion of scientific discovery in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Francis Bacon based the call for a “new instrument” for knowledge acquisition on what are essentially psychological grounds: four categories of “idols” of mind that serve to skew unaided observation and sense-making and thereby lead to hasty or erroneous conclusions. The idols as described represent psychological categories or kinds that would not be out of step in a contemporary curriculum: cognitive mechanisms (“the tribe”), disposition and habit (“the cave”), ambiguities stemming from language and communication (“the marketplace”), and deeply engrained culturally normative ideation (“the theater”). Bacon’s call for a more systematic method of inquiry proceeds not from analysis of the nature of the objects investigated so much as on the features (the limitations) of the inquiring subject (Bacon, Novum Organum, 1937/1620). One might note also that historians of psychology have analyzed the psychologically thematic content of many other early modern philosophers who were concerned with the grounding of scientific knowledge (e.g., Descartes, Hobbs, Locke, Hume, Kant); (see Leahey, 2017; Pickren & Rutherford, 2010; Robinson, ...