Stafetten - Séamus Power

Stafetten er Indputs faste indlæg om fakultetets ansatte, hvor de svarer på vores spørgsmål om sig selv og derpå sender stafetten videre til en ansat efter eget ønske. Denne gang er det Séamus Power, der har stafetten.

Af Sofie Harboe, stud.psych.
Illustration af Ida-Marie Heausler, stud.psych.

Why did you choose to study psychology?

I attended a working-class school in my home town of Waterford in Ireland. We had a very engaged history teacher named Bill Doherty. And history quickly became my favorite subject in school. In those lessons, I was transported to multiple social, economic, political, and cultural worlds. Some of the questions that were raised in that class continue to fascinate me: How and why do people revolt against authority? How best to organize societies to maintain peace? How can people, and societies more broadly, thrive culturally, economically, and socially?

Having said that, I spent the first year of my BSc in Applied Psychology at University College Cork doing classes in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) which I showed no real interest in. I transitioned towards psychology, and really felt alive in the classes titled “Culture & Cognition” taught by John McCarthy and “The Cultural Nature of Human Development” by Angela Veale. I have not looked back since then.

If not psychology, what would you have studied/done?

One of my identities is as a cultural psychologist. And cultural psychology exists on the borderlands between multiple disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics, history, and philosophy. Given the types of research and teaching I do, I think I could have (happily) carved out an area of interest in each of these disciplines as an academic. 

For much of my bachelor’s degree I had thought about being a clinical psychologist. I worked with adults with intellectual disabilities while I was doing my undergraduate degree. But I spent the summer after my BSc traveling through Scandinavia (including a lovely stay in Copenhagen), Eastern Europe, Russia, and South America before moving to the University of Cambridge to undertake a masters in social and developmental psychology. This trip was the first time I began to shift my thinking away from having a career in clinical psychology - where one focuses on resolving individual problems - and started to think seriously about global issues, economic systems, political structures, and cultural practices. I further developed my interest in cultural psychology during three more years of travelling with two friends after Cambridge before finally landing at the University of Chicago to do my PhD in the transdisciplinary Department of Comparative Human Development. I spent seven years in Chicago as a PhD student and then a postdoc with the cultural psychologist and anthropologist Richard Shweder, the linguistic anthropologist John Lucy, and the social psychologists David Nussbaum and Alex Gillespie (Alex is at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was the outside reader on my dissertation).

How would you describe the development/change of psychology from when you studied until now?

The over-reliance on WEIRD samples (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) has been well documented as a particular problem in psychological research. The issue is of forming generalized, or even universalized, theories in psychology from studying an atypical slice of humanity (mostly undergraduate students from western countries like the United States). Psychologists have talked about this problem both before and after the seminal paper by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan (titled “The Weirdest People in the World”) but little has changed in terms of research practices.        

The second major issue has been the “replication crisis.” This is the demonstration that a majority of one cohort of experimental studies published in premier academic journals did not replicate under more stringent experimental and statistical procedures. The reasons for the lack of replication of some psychological studies is intensely debated. The dominant response to the ‘replication crisis’ has been to increase experimental standards and to introduce greater levels of transparency (e.g. pre-registration of hypotheses). But some psychologists – including myself – see the replication crisis as demonstrating the limits of the experimental social psychological paradigm to fully comprehend how people think, feel, and act in context. Some argue for the re-expansion of the social psychological paradigm to more holistically comprehend human experiences and meaning-making processes. One promising approach is the re-emergence of field social psychology, which I describe more fully below.

Another change has been the popularity of social media, media outreach, and writing op-eds. This is now valued in hiring and promotion. Of course the best media coverage amplifies important research findings. Perhaps because it addresses real world issues, some of the research my collaborators and I have conducted has been featured in international media such as The Guardian, The Atlantic, and the BBC. I also enjoy supporting student-led efforts such as podcasts, interviews, and input to magazines.

What do you expect the study/discipline of psychology to look like in 20 years? 

There is a famous class taught at the University of Chicago titled “If someone asserts it, deny it; if someone denies it, assert it.” It is a Socratic seminar meant to be a broad recipe for maintaining academic freedom, learning to follow an argument where it leads, and staying on the move between multiple points of view. I hope psychology continues to strive towards making these fundamental processes of social science manifest in teaching and research.

I do worry about the encroachment of corporations on psychological research. They have the power to fund certain projects, and, by implication, not others. As such, corporations have the power to undermine freedom of academic inquiry. I see this is a major problem within Denmark and elsewhere too.

One future of psychology is to see increased collaborations across regional contexts. Technology has increased the ease of these collaborations. We will see the increased use of big data, more sophisticated textual analyses, and online sampling. Simultaneously, we will also see a turn in the opposite direction – the proliferation of the case study, examining social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena as they unfold, in context, over time. My colleague Gabriel Velez at Marquette University in the USA and I have been articulating this position by arguing for the re-emergence of field social psychology. This is an approach that advocates for examining social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena with high levels of ecological validity, using case studies which are situated in historical time and geographic location, that span qualitative and or quantitative methodological procedures.

 In terms of research topics, I imagine there will be generative lines of research examining psychological perspectives on climate change and ways to mitigate its consequences. Globalization and migration will continue to be major topics of psychological research. One question my collaborators and I are currently investigating is: what are the scopes and limits for tolerance of diverse cultural practices when people from the Middle East, Africa, South America, and parts of Asia migrate to western liberal democracies and bring with them cultural practices and ways of life people in liberal democracies think are illiberal?

What are your favorite three things in your everyday life?

People: I love being around people. Of course this means my family and friends. But I also love being around brilliant colleagues and inspiring students. And it also means strangers – as a psychologist, I’m always interested in getting to know new people from around the world, whether they are in my local community or when I travel elsewhere. The other favorite part of life is travel: I feel excited going to different parts of the world to enjoy new experiences, food, conversations, and culture. Finally, I was recently gifted a coffee-grinder; so, I generally start the day with a cup of coffee made from freshly ground beans and I read the newspapers.

If you had the chance to go back to when you were a student, what advice would you give yourself? 

I think I worked effectively as an undergraduate: I attended every lecture and seminar in the final two years (in the Irish system, it’s the final two years that count towards your overall grade!) and had meaningful relationships with friends in my department as well as senior students and faculty. I was also immersed in the city (Cork) in which I lived.

But I felt more unprepared when I moved to Cambridge. I come from a working-class background. My dad worked in a factory. My mum was a part-time florist. I was not socialized into the world of Cambridge. This was a world built on informal networks and I didn’t have the soft-skills necessary to successfully navigate it. I did well academically but failed to achieve funding for the PhD place I was offered there. The lesson I learned, and the one I would tell other students who want to pursue research careers, is that building meaningful relationships with a broad range of people is important to be both happy and successful. In this particular case, it means developing relationships with faculty, students, and potential funders, being an engaged citizen of the department, and realizing the latter two – whether you like it or not – really matter in developing your career.

Who shall receive the baton from you? 

Guido Makransky: He is doing great work with his students and collaborators using virtual reality.

A great thanks to Séamus Power