In the behavioral sciences, one of the main methodological tensions is between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Traditionally, qualitative approaches focus on understanding human behavior through the reasons people give for it, usually obtained through unstructured interviews and participant observation. Here, researchers use their capacity for empathy and understanding, by “putting themselves in other people’s shoes” and evaluating what things look like from that point of view. In contrast, quantitative approaches focus on explaining human behavior by identifying processes and mechanisms that give rise to it. Typically, quantitative researchers use experiments, data, and statistics to achieve this goal.
Qualitative and quantitative approaches have drifted apart over the past century, which is infelicitous, because in my view they complement each other. I recently saw an interesting example of this while visiting a conference on the philosophy of psychiatry. In psychiatry, anomalous experiences are high on the research agenda – especially hallucinations. At the conference, I saw a talk by a qualitative researcher who conducted interviews with individuals going through a psychosis. He argued that, if you dig down the experiential reports, people who say they “hear voices” actually should not be understood in the ordinary way – they do not hear voices in the way we do. For instance, the voices in question lack properties of auditory stimuli; they often have no spatial direction (the voices are not experienced as coming from anywhere in particular) or loudness (they are not soft or hard).
I also saw a talk by a quantitative researcher, who investigates people having auditory hallucinations using fMRI. In the scanner, participants pressed a button when they heard a voice; this information was used to contrast periods in which participants heard voices with periods in which they did not. The research picked up activity in parts of the cortex that are involved in early processing of signals that would normally come from the eardrums. This might explain why the voices are experienced as coming from outside: they are rooted in a signal that would normally only be activated by external auditory stimulation.
What I found interesting is that the information I received from the neuroscientist improved my ability to understand the experiential reports from the phenomenologist. One can imagine that one picks up this kind of signal in the absence of one’s eardrums being stimulated, and one can also understand why this would be experienced as coming from outside while lacking attributes of directionality and loudness. So it seems evident that here these two approaches are not in competition, but mutually supportive: the quantitative data make it easier to put yourself in the qualitative shoes.
This suggests that empathic abilities we use to understand people, like other abilities, are amplified by information and technical advances. There are certainly historical examples of this. The invention of the novel allowed humans to represent internal struggles of people in writing, and film allowed us to literally see the world from somebody else’s perspective. More recent advances like first person games and VR environments further amplify this; I know one researcher who records conversations between parents and children and then uses VR to show parents what that conversation looks like from the perspective of the child. In the 21st century, psychological science should not turn away from first person experience, but develop tools and theories that improve our understanding of each other.
In the behavioral sciences, one of the main methodological tensions is between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Traditionally, qualitative approaches focus on understanding human behavior through the reasons people give for it, usually obtained through unstructured interviews and participant observation. Here, researchers use their capacity for empathy and understanding, by “putting themselves in other people’s shoes” and evaluating what things look like from that point of view. In contrast, quantitative approaches focus on explaining human behavior by identifying processes and mechanisms that give rise to it. Typically, quantitative researchers use experiments, data, and statistics to achieve this goal.
Qualitative and quantitative approaches have drifted apart over the past century, which is infelicitous, because in my view they complement each other. I recently saw an interesting example of this while visiting a conference on the philosophy of psychiatry. In psychiatry, anomalous experiences are high on the research agenda – especially hallucinations. At the conference, I saw a talk by a qualitative researcher who conducted interviews with individuals going through a psychosis. He argued that, if you dig down the experiential reports, people who say they “hear voices” actually should not be understood in the ordinary way – they do not hear voices in the way we do. For instance, the voices in question lack properties of auditory stimuli; they often have no spatial direction (the voices are not experienced as coming from anywhere in particular) or loudness (they are not soft or hard).
I also saw a talk by a quantitative researcher, who investigates people having auditory hallucinations using fMRI. In the scanner, participants pressed a button when they heard a voice; this information was used to contrast periods in which participants heard voices with periods in which they did not. The research picked up activity in parts of the cortex that are involved in early processing of signals that would normally come from the eardrums. This might explain why the voices are experienced as coming from outside: they are rooted in a signal that would normally only be activated by external auditory stimulation.
What I found interesting is that the information I received from the neuroscientist improved my ability to understand the experiential reports from the phenomenologist. One can imagine that one picks up this kind of signal in the absence of one’s eardrums being stimulated, and one can also understand why this would be experienced as coming from outside while lacking attributes of directionality and loudness. So it seems evident that here these two approaches are not in competition, but mutually supportive: the quantitative data make it easier to put yourself in the qualitative shoes.
This suggests that empathic abilities we use to understand people, like other abilities, are amplified by information and technical advances. There are certainly historical examples of this. The invention of the novel allowed humans to represent internal struggles of people in writing, and film allowed us to literally see the world from somebody else’s perspective. More recent advances like first person games and VR environments further amplify this; I know one researcher who records conversations between parents and children and then uses VR to show parents what that conversation looks like from the perspective of the child. In the 21st century, psychological science should not turn away from first person experience, but develop tools and theories that improve our understanding of each other.
