This post lays out my worst fears for the future for social psychology, the field to which I have devoted my adult life. It is a companion to another post that lays out my best hopes for the same field. The combination exemplifies my intellectual style of trying to contemplate important issues carefully “both sides from the inside.”

Social psychology continues to change in its methods, practices, and values. Are these building toward a better science that will shed ever clearer light on how ordinary people think, feel, and act? Or is it losing touch with what made it great, and descending into investigating dubious and peripheral problems, producing little that will be of interest to the social science community’s efforts to construct a correct understanding of the human condition? In this post, I focus on reasons to think the latter. This is a deliberate exercise in intellectual pessimism, worst-case scenario thinking, and negativity bias. One can imagine any or all of these dark scenarios unfolding.

Instead, researchers shift to what can be done effectively with large samples, thereby eliminating direct laboratory observations of genuine behavior in favor of having research participants sit at computers and make ratings. Essentially, we map out people’s fantasies and thought processes, losing touch with reality. The other social sciences will come to know this about us and shrug off our work as trivial fantasies.

Instead, careers and contributions are judged by their relevance to particular political ideals. This starts with requiring conference presentations to state what they do for ‘social justice’, and soon the journals follow suit, and research grant committees also. Editors can be fired for publishing papers that are politically incorrect. Gradually, the research community comes around to accepting that the purpose of social psychology is to support a particular political worldview, rather than seek the truth even if it is not what we want. (Probably, though, social psychologists would continue to pretend to be pure scientists, exploiting the credibility of science to support political activism and social engineering.) Instead of struggling to understand the complex tradeoffs and diversity of human behavior, social psychologists divide the world into good and evil, and they do what they can to furnish data for the political causes they favor.

Any honest generalist has grown accustomed to accepting findings that he or she does not like. If we insist on findings that fit a particular worldview, we will build a false understanding of reality. The dark future would include more and more cases of papers being censored and retracted for political reasons. The field’s published literature is based on political ideals, not search for truth, and as such becomes untrustworthy.

Bottom line: Social psychology is abandoning the methods that made it great, which were based on staging live social interactions in the laboratory and observing behavior. Instead, it largely studies the effects of thoughts on other thoughts. Bureaucratic, methodological, and political forces gradually hamper and corrupt the research process.