Beyond the crisis in psychology

During this year’s Distinguished Lorentz Fellow Talk, current fellow Iris van Rooij addresses the crisis in psychology and discusses the need for interdisciplinary research to find solutions in her field. She will do so by giving examples from her research project in which she questions contemporary research methods in psychological science. She argues that it’s not effects but explanations that need to be discovered in psychology.

In this talk we will explore and discuss the theoretical foundations of psychology. The so-called ‘replication crisis’ has left psychological science at an impasse. Over the past few years, psychological science has been reforming. Yet, much of psychology is still primarily in the business of discovering and confirming ‘effects’. This leaves contemporary psychology without strong formal and computational foundations, a scarcity of theoretical rigor, and a proliferation of just-so stories.

How to regain its credibility and legitimacy? Van Rooij argues that a new theoretical framework is needed. What is the potential and what are the barriers of theory development within psychological science? What does an interdisciplinary research approach within psychology entail? This NIAS talk is moderated by Jan Willem Duyvendak, Director of NIAS.

About the speakers

Iris van Rooij is Distinguished Lorentz Fellow 2020/21 at NIAS. Van Rooij is Associate Professor in Computational Cognitive Science at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is specialised in cognitive science and psychology. Van Rooij is one of the pioneers in the development of tools for theory development in psychological science in the Netherlands.

Jan Willem Duyvendak (moderator) is Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam since 2014.