The Unbuilt Bench - by David Andrew Peterson

About the Book

In The Unbuilt Bench, David Peterson argues that the scientific study of the mind and human behavior is a different sort of epistemic activity than the work of the natural sciences.

Book Synopsis

Psychological experts are omnipresent across public and private spheres. Nonetheless, psychology has always been dogged by questions about its authority and validity. Psychological research has yielded relatively few unambiguous successes, and the widely publicized "replication crisis" has called much of the published literature into question. How closely akin to other experimental sciences is psychology, and should its findings be assessed by the same standards? What makes psychology distinct, and how do such differences affect understandings of the boundaries of science?

In The Unbuilt Bench, David Peterson argues that the scientific study of the mind and human behavior is a different sort of epistemic activity than the work of the natural sciences. Through fieldwork in ten experimental psychology laboratories and, as a comparison, a molecular biology lab, he explores the concrete practices of experimentation. Ongoing improvement of research practice and technology at the frontiers of data collection, a process Peterson calls "bench-building," is essential to most sciences, since it opens new possibilities for experimentation. Psychology labs, however, largely lack an emphasis on bench-building. Instead, the discipline and its subfields gravitate toward different dimensions of scientific progress that focus on theory building and cultivation of outside audiences. An empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated exploration of experimental psychology and scientific practice, The Unbuilt Bench also offers new insight into the ethical questions that psychology's aims raise.

Review Quotes

How wonderful to see this kind of work from the new generation of researchers!--Andrew Gelman "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog"

An arresting ethnography of several laboratories, The Unbuilt Bench reveals the struggles of knowledge production and identifies an underappreciated feature that psychological science might embrace to accelerate progress. "Bench building," Peterson shows, is fundamental for increasing the capacity to accumulate insight.--Brian Nosek, cofounder of the Center for Open Science

In this highly original comparative study, Peterson digs deeply to discover and explain the restrictions and the benefits that psychology gets from its natural science aspirations. He offers a much-needed corrective to notions of progress and underdevelopment in science.--Karin Knorr Cetina, author of Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge

About the Author

David Peterson is an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University.