This month’s article is Amateur hour: Improving knowledge diversity in psychological and behavioural science by harnessing contributions from amateurs (preprint) from Mohlhenrich & Krpan, who are the founders of Seeds of Science @SeedsofScience, which was previously described in this forum post (and shout out to Mohlhenrich, who is actually an amateur researcher himself). They claim (and I generally agree) that:
Psychological and behavioral science (PBS) suffers from a lack of diversity in its key intellectual and research activities (Krpan, 2020; Medin, Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2017). This low “knowledge diversity” is reflected in numerous aspects of the field—certain research topics (e.g., those that may be easily publishable) are prioritized over other important but less desirable topics (e.g., those that are not heavily cited or easy to publish); some methodologies such as experimentation are widely used whereas less common methods (e.g., self-observation) are neglected; short-term projects with quick gains are prioritized over the long-term ones; some participant populations are understudied (e.g., non-WEIRD samples; i.e., non-western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010); and theorizing is driven by arbitrary conventions and overly reliant on available research findings while avoiding speculation that could lead to new insights (Krpan, 2020, 2021a; Medin et al., 2017; Stanford, 2019).
Several strategies for long term systematic change have already been proposed to increase knowledge diversity in PBS. But the authors propose an alternative, short term strategy: ‘harnessing contributions from amateurs who can explore the diverse aspects of psychology that are neglected in academia’ and go on to describe (and provide examples of) five types of amateurs who can be categorized on the basis of their expertise distance and expertise level (Figure 1):
- Independent scientists
- Outsiders
- Undergraduate students
- Quantified self practitioners
- Citizen scientists
They then identify six types of problems (‘blind-spots’) that are not well incentivized in academia but would be suitable for amateur research (Table 1):
- Long-term projects
- Basic observational research
- Speculation
- Interdisciplinary projects
- Aimless projects
- Uncommon research areas
Finally, the authors provide suggestions across five areas for facilitating amateur participation in PBS, including:
- Encouraging non-traditional academic relationships
- Creating a digital amateur research hub
- Providing editorial support for amateurs at academic journals
- Founding an amateur PBS institute to support their work (joining the Ronin Institute or IGDORE is also an option for amateur researchers seeking institutional support)
- Reducing scepticism of professional PBS academics towards amateurs
To make the case for amateurs increasing knowledge diversity, the authors note:
The blind spots we have identified (and further ones that we are not even aware of, the “unknown unknowns”) arise from constraints that have both functional and mental aspects. For example, a PBS researcher may be discouraged from pursuing a long, aimless project (perhaps one that deals with a taboo subject) in a functional sense (e.g., they will not get jobs or tenure if they do not publish), but also in the mental sense—being systematically disincentivized to undertake such projects over time may influence them to adopt a mode of thinking that makes it difficult to spontaneously generate ideas for “blind spot” research. The main argument we are making in this article is that amateurs can more easily address the blind spots that hamper knowledge diversity than professionals because they are free from the functional constraints and are therefore also less likely to be hampered by the mental constraints.
As an independent scientist (well as a neuroscientist working on biophysics, I’d probably fit better with the ‘outsider’ category in this article), I’ve noticed that amateur/independent researchers often seem to come up with interesting ideas and innovative approaches for new research projects (myself included, although I may be a bit biased…). I don’t know if this is because we’ve been liberated from any mental constraints of academia, and there can certainly be other functional constraints (such as balancing salaried work w/ research, getting journal access, etc.), but I think it would be good to consider further. If there was evidence for amateurs being able to come up with ideas to address blind spots more easily than academic researchers, it would make a strong case to increase support for amateur research contributions (which wouldn’t be hard, as there isn’t much currently).
I think this paper is well worth reading for anybody interested in increasing knowledge diversity, regardless of whether they work inside or outside academia. If nothing else, both groups are likely to pick up ideas for new strategies they could use to generate research ideas and new ways they could seek support from the other group.