Silvia Helena Koller - Psychology in Brazil: Scientists Making a Difference

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Almost everything we learn about the field of psychology in our university studies quickly becomes out of date. I studied as an undergraduate student at Yale University from 1968 to 1972 and then as a graduate PhD student at Stanford University from 1972 to 1975, and I can say with confidence that almost nothing I learned, including even methods of statistical analysis, is of much use today. It is a tribute to the field that it advances so rapidly that what one learns at one time becomes dated so quickly and so completely. What, then, is the value of studying psychology (or, really, any scientific field) in university if what one learns quickly becomes outdated?

The main value, I believe, is learning how scientists think about problems. In particular, what makes a problem scientifically or societally important? How does one translate an idea about a phenomenon into a research study? How does one interpret data analysis in terms of a prior theory so that the theory sheds light on the data rather than leading one astray? How does one relate one stream of scientific work to another? These are the kinds of questions that universities can teach their students to answer. Universities, thus, have a great deal to teach their students about how scientists explore the world and the human mind.

There is yet another problem, however, besides work going out of date. And this other problem is the enormous challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff in scientific research. When I was early in my career, there were perhaps a dozen first-rate journals to which one might submit ones work and another dozen that were just below the top ones. Today, journals have proliferated to the point that it is difficult even to recognize what the important ones are. Some of the new journals are top flight, but others are of much more variable quality, and some are journals in name only. Even within the reputable journals, however, there is a great variation in the quality of work that is published.

What is to be done? Susan Fiske, Donald Foss, and I thought that we might make a meaningful contribution to the education of the next generation of research (and possibly other) psychologists by editing a book, which eventually was entitled Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk About Their Most Important Contributions (Sternberg et al. 2016). As, at the time, past, present, and future presidents of the Federation of Association in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in the United States, we had the dual goal of educating our young people and of supporting the Federation through the contribution of all our royalties. We used objective criteria to choose these highly eminent psychologists, based on the work done by Diener et al. (2014). The essays, we believed, represented the best of what psychology had to offer in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. All contributing authors were invited to talk about their work, what motivated the work, and what they thought the contribution of the work was to the field and to society. A notable limitation of the volume, though, was that North Americans were way overrepresented, with relatively few essays from outside the North American continent. Thus, the scope of the work could not possibly encompass all of the great work being done on other continents, such as in South America. Brazil, one of the largest countries in the world by population, had no representation at all in our volume.

I therefore am delighted that Silvia Koller has chosen to edit a related companion volume, published by Springer, entitled Psychology in Brazil: Scientists Making a Difference. As did Fiske, Foss, and I, she provided the scientists with a distinctive list of questions to address. Her questions were 1. What is your most important scientific contribution? 2. Why do you consider it as your most important contribution? 3. How did the idea come about? (Mentors, readings, contacts, teams, inspiration, etc.) 4. How does your contribution add to the production of international scientific knowledge? 5. How is your contribution reflected in the world outside academic psychology? 6. What would you like to see as the next steps in theory and/or research, based on what you produced?