humility

St. Teresa of Ávila once wrote that humility was the root of all other virtue. Now, if she--and you--may pardon the analogy, it occurred to me in reading Sechrest & Smith's article that humility may well lie at the root of scientific progress as well. Perhaps, I thought, we ought to think of humility as a scientific virtue as well as a personal one.

What do I mean by humility here? I mean a willingness to engage with experts from diverse areas and diverse fields, even if doing so means violating the strictures of "disciplinary apartheid." When we become overly attached to our own "disciplinary specialization," we are easily drawn into a win/lose, us/them mentality, "compet[ing] with each other for preeminence, rather than trying to learn from each other" (p. 13). This competitive mindset in turn impels us to rely primarily or even solely on statistical methods (like hypothesis testing) that focus more on a significant/nonsignificant (i.e. win/lose) p-value judgment rather than methods that focus on exploration, model building and refinement, and pattern recognition (with the determination of p-values used only as one tool in a large and varied toolbox). By working to prove our own preeminence, we're engaging in a kind of scientific hubris that can distract us from seeing the unexpected and making new discoveries. As any Greek tragedy could tell us, hubris ultimately leads to catastrophe--or, in our case, stagnation and the preservation of overly simplistic models of psychopathology.

If we are humble, on the other hand, we will not hesitate to seek advice and support from experts from different areas, and we will not avoid entertaining ideas that conflict with our pet theories as though they were some kind of personal threat. When I think about my own area of interest, autism, all I seem able to think about is how silly it is that any of us should attempt to approach the problem from only one discipline's perspective. We need not just clinical folks, but developmental, social, cognitive, quantitative, neuro, and community folks as well. So many research areas are split by discipline rather than topic, such that important crosstalk and debate never happens. Everyone from one theoretical perspective is grouped together, and there's no one there to say, "Hey, let's approach this problem from an utterly different direction!"


\begin{rant supporting my own disciplinary orientation as a supplement to other theoretical positions}
I think it's quite possible, for example, for researchers of certain disciplinary heritages to think of autism as "developmental" only in regards to its classification as a pervasive developmental disorder. Too few theorists, in my opinion, are familiar enough with normative developmental processes across a range of domains to begin to think seriously about how early disruptions may have cascading effects in multiple domains that are usually not thought of as so closely intertwined. (For example, disruption of connective pathways between the cerebellum and the cerebrum might lead, in the case of stroke in older patients, to aphasia via diaschisis...if these connections were disrupted in early infancy, we might see far more profound and far-reaching impairments due to the interrelatedness of many areas of development. However, theorists are often unwilling to entertain such notions, dismissing them because we know that certain kinds of trauma in older individuals lead to different symptoms than those we're concerned about in autism. [I'm not sure that digression made any sense at all.])
\end{rant}

So, glossing over developmental processes and cognitive models, social researchers might focus on problems of social relatedness, and develop interventions only for those problems. And cognitive researchers might focus on a linguistic model and develop language interventions, while doing a pretty little dance away from social issues. And so on...while all the while information from differing disciplines is begging to be put together as a coherent (I might even say integrated) whole.

Phew. Reading over this, I see many places in which this blog entry is very un-integrated. But I'd like to go to bed now, so I will. I look forward to a rousing debate with you all on Wednesday!