Leisure Drive

Leisure is an integral component of the human pursuit of happiness and wellbeing (Newman et al. 2014), with roots in Epicureanism, the ‘pleasure principle’ of Freudian psychology,

and the ‘nirvana’ of Buddhism. It has long been an institution unto itself, with whole journals dedicated to its study in sociology and social psychology (Tinsley & Tinsley 1986, Crawford et al. 1991, Iwasaki 2008, Kleiber et al. 2011, Brajsa-Zgnanec et al. 2011, Barnett 2013, Freire 2013). Few (if any) other animals can be said to engage in leisure. But if they do, the scale, complexity, and time / energy / material allocation commitments involved all pale in comparison to humans.  

Attraction to leisure, or ‘Leisure Drive’, was introduced in a previous post [ here ] about pyramids of human motivation. Here, I develop greater definition of Leisure Drive — as a deeply ingrained adaptive cognitive domain, defining a fundamental need to dispel negative mood, deployed mainly as a reprieve from the cost of consciousness: self-impermanence anxiety (Aarssen 2007, 2010). Leisure Drive is satisfied by hard-wired pleasure perceptions associated with various forms of sensory gratification, relaxation, cognitive/intellectual stimuli and enlightenment, social affiliations, physical fitness / exercise involving recreational athletics/team sports, and various emotions involving intimacy, family relations, companionship, belongingness, etc. Initially, pleasure-based motivations to seek

and engage with these experiences — modulated by prescribed ‘cocktails’ of hormones and neurotransmitters — would have evolved because of their particular rudimental or proximate effects on evolutionary fitness — i.e. in promoting survival (e.g. resting, eating nutritious foods, cultivating social alliances, learning and understanding through curiosity and imagination, using play and games to practice social skills and rehearse for war), and in promoting reproduction (e.g. sexual arousal, courtship, parental care) and welfare for one’s collateral lineage (e.g. affection for kin).

Importantly however, as posited here, natural selection was not finished. Attraction to the above activities and pursuits was honed further by evolution, purely for the sake of their sheer intrinsic enjoyment. In other words, these ancient, innately endowed pleasure modules became not just anticipated within daily routines, but also intentionally planned and prioritized for free-time indulgence — i.e. directly functional as a domain-general need in its own right. As ventures of leisure, they served (and continue today in serving, probably uniquely for humans) a primary role in propelling ancestral genes into future generations: by providing easily deployed distractions (buffers) from the inevitable

anxieties of life, including the most elemental and most debilitating of all — awareness of self-impermanence, and its associated fear of failed legacy. ‘Forgetting of self’ and ‘decreased awareness of time’ are regarded as key cognitive attributes of leisure experiences (Tinsley and Tinsley 1986), to which we can thus add — in addition to those above — mind-altering escapism in things like stories, videos, comedy, carnivals, festivals, thrill seeking, shopping, toys, hobbies, vacations, aesthetics, music, nostalgia, yoga, meditation, secular spiritualism, sleep, mood medication, and substance-induced intoxication and hallucination. Opportunities for these various indulgences have, of course, grown exponentially through cultural evolution ever since the dawn of Neolithic agriculture.

By distracting the mind with these many options for triggering pleasure / bliss / ecstasy / nirvana, Leisure Drive then enables a forgetting of self, and hence a denial of death (Becker 1973). It delivers an escape from time and from the terror of history (e.g. see Ruiz 2011) by palliating the many hardships, sufferings, and absurdities that (for most of ancestral as well as contemporary humanity) were/are routine consequences of just being alive (Benatar 2006). These distractions (occurring with sufficient magnitude, duration and frequency), it can be argued, thus served our ancestors genes by preventing self-impermanence salience and other anxieties from compromising the successful deployment of Sexual/Familial Drives. After all, for many people, ‘escape from self’ also has a darker side, as motivation for suicide (Baumeister 1990). Recent studies have shown that when the mind is allowed to wander disengaged, essentially unoccupied by fulfilling motivations and unprotected by ‘present-moment’ mindfulness, it is usually an anxious,

unhappy mind (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010, Wilson et al. 2014). Leisure Drive then functions — probably subconsciously much of the time — to help ensure that such anxieties are kept largely in check by more edifying ventures for escape to ‘outside-of-self’, at least until reproductive age is attained.


Accordingly, a sense of ‘meaning’ in life is evoked here — and ironically, is actually defined — in terms of being sufficiently distracted (through pleasure) from the nagging worry (echoing Camus 1942) that there possibly/probably isn’t any meaning. Pre-occupation, activated by Leisure Drive, effectively diverts the sentient mind from its impulsive

tendency to arrive at (and to relentlessly revisit) an unsettling deduction: that notions of self-transcendence or of a grand cosmic purpose for one’s life are / may be nothing but imaginary mental constructs. For many then, a life may be meaningful by simply filling it adequately with things that feel good, without knowingly harming others of course — because, for most people today (thanks in part to genetic bequeathal), pleasure is normally evoked by helping (not harming) others, and by showing kindness (Rudd et al. 2014) and cooperation (Bowles and Gintis 2011) with others.


All of this, however, begs the question: why is the above deduction, for most humans, so routinely salient and at the same time so immediately unsettling in the first place? One hypothesis, argued in a later post, is that this whole syndrome of mental anxiety generated a uniquely human goal system that played a critical role in driving ancestors to reproduce. All animals have Sex Drive, but only humans have Legacy Drive.

References

Aarssen, L W. (2007). Some bold evolutionary predictions for the future of mating in humans. Oikos, 116, 1768-78.

Aarssen, L. W. (2010). Darwinism and meaning. Biological Theory, 5, 296–311.

Barnett, L. (2013). What people want from their leisure: The contributions of personality facets in differentially predicting desired leisure outcomes. Journal of Leisure Research, 45, 150-191.

Baumeister, R. F. 1990. Suicide as escape from self. Psychological Review, 97, 90-113.

Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Garbinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8, 505–516.

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Benatar, D. (2006). Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Brajsa-Zganec, A., Merkas, M., & Sverko, I. (2011). Quality of life and leisure activities: How do leisure activities contribute to subjective well-being. Social Indicators Research, 102, 81-91.

Camus, A. ([1942] 1955). The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays (O’Brien J, trans). New York: Knopf.

Crawford, D. W., Jackson, E. L., & Godbey, G. (1991). A hierarchical model of leisure constraints. Leisure Sciences, 13, 309-320.

Freire, T. (2013). Positive Leisure Science: From Subjective Experience to Social Contexts. Dordrecht: Springer.

Iwasaki, Y. (2008). Pathways to meaning-making through leisure-like pursuits in global contexts. Journal of Leisure Research, 40, 231-249.

Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330, 932.

Kleiber, D.A., Walker, G.J., & Mannell, R. C. 2011. A Social Psychology of Leisure, 2nd edn. State College PA: Venture Publishing.

Newman, D. B., Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2014). Leisure and subjective well-being: A model of psychological mechanisms as mediating factors. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15, 555-578.

Rudd, M., Aakerb, J., & Nortonc, M. I. (2014). Getting the most out of giving: Concretely framing a prosocial goal maximizes happiness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 11–24.

Ruiz, T. F. (2011). The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tinsley, H. E. A., & Tinsley, D. J. (1986). A theory of the attributes, benefits and causes of leisure experience. Leisure Sciences, 8, 1-45.

Wilson, T. D, Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Social psychology. Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind. Science. 345, 75-77.

Pyramids of needs

Other animals spend their whole lives trying to get fed, stay alive, and get laid. That’s about it. But the needs of modern humans involve much more. This is captured especially well I think in the work of French philosopher Albert Camus (1942), suggesting that we humans are creatures who spend our whole lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.

Motivation theories have inspired many decades of research in the behavioral sciences (Deci & Ryan 2000, Cosmides & Tooby 2013). In one of the early influential models, Maslow’s (1943) ‘pyramid of needs’ defines several more or less universal features of human nature in terms of a hierarchical series of motivations. Thus the most basal categories are ‘immediate physiological needs’ followed by ‘safety’, and higher order needs are distinguished by ‘love (affection, belongingness)’ and ‘esteem (respect)’, with ‘self-actualization’ occupying the apex of the pyramid. The pyramidal architecture then serves to represent that higher order needs are normally not attained unless more basal needs are met first, and that these commonly manifest along a developmental trajectory with advancing age.

An important update of the Maslow pyramid was proposed recently by Kenrick et al. (2010) to give it a more explicitly Darwinian framework, firmly grounded in modern evolutionary theory — i.e. where motivations are linked to their presumed/probable functions as adaptive cognitive domains in rewarding the reproductive success of ancestors. This approach has parallels in the more recent ‘Selfish Goal’ model of Huang and Bargh (2014) and in an earlier account of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan 2000), which also regards “…psychological needs as universal aspects of human nature…” and which “…fits broadly in an adaptationalist perspective that emphasizes how our common evolutionary heritage produces such regularity” (p. 252).

Fig. 1. The pyramid hierarchy of fundamental human needs /
motives by Kenrick et al (2010), modified from Maslow (1943).

In the Kenrick et al. (2010) pyramid ‘renovation’ (Fig. 1), Maslow’s lower and mid-level needs are essentially retained (with some revised labelling) but the major and significant distinction is the replacement of the pyramid apex by three goals drawn from evolutionary life history theory: mate acquisition, mate retention, and parenting. In this renovation, Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ is not regarded as a functional need, and is considered instead to be “… largely subsumed within status (esteem) and mating-related motives” (Kenrick et al. 2010, p. 239).

But something important it seems to me is missing here. Building on inspiration from the Kenrick et al. renovation, I offer another version for remodeling a pyramid of human needs or ‘drives’ (Fig. 2) — also conceptually framed by Darwinian evolution. To reinforce the central importance of the latter, the exalted pyramid cap represents not a motivation per se, but the overarching functional (adaptive) consequence connected to all of the underlying needs / drives: gene transmission success. The lowest and highest categories of motivations in Figure 2 have essentially the same elements as corresponding levels in the Kenrick et al. version. In the latter, those levels associated with the core of ‘somatic effort’ — Immediate Physiological Needs, Self-Protection, and Affliliation (Fig. 1) — are subsumed here under Survival Drive (Fig. 2). Similarly, the higher order ‘reproductive effort’ needs — Mate Acquisition, Mate Retention, and Parenting (Fig. 1) — are distilled within Sexual/Familial Drives, which also includes kin-helping (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. The ‘four-drives’ model for additional renovation of the pyramid of 

human needs, building on the explicitly Darwinian framework incorporated 

by Kenrick et al. (2010) (Fig. 1). Needs are represented here within four 

fundamental human ‘drives’, representing products of selection for distinct 

domains of human motivations that were essential — collectively as an 

integrated set, it is argued — for effecting gene transmission success in 

ancestors. The latter — the overarching evolutionary ‘goal’/consequence — 

thus occupies the apex position (the only level in the hierarchy distinguished 

as a pyramid in its own right).

The most significant renovation proposed here involves greater emphasis on a ‘narrative of the self’, involving motivational elements that include and expand on notions of self-actualization — not as a priority (in the Maslow sense) only after all other core needs are satisfied, but rather as a more integrative construct at the mid-level. In this sense, ‘Legacy Drive’ is inserted as a distinct intermediary domain of motivation (Fig. 2) — and within which, the ‘Status/Esteem’ needs of Kenrick et al (2010; Fig. 1) are subsumed. ‘Legacy Drive’, together with a second intermediary domain — ‘Leisure Drive’ (Fig. 2) — represent adaptive cognitive systems rooted in uniquely human, innate predilections for existential meaning, purpose and larger-than-self identity (Aarssen 2010, Klinger 2012, MacKenzie & Baumeister 2014). Importantly, it is argued, failure to meet these domain-level psychological needs — as with failure to meet survival needs — can be expected to limit or incapacitate deployment of the higher order (Sexual/Familial) Drives linked most proximally to reproductive / gene-transmission success.

Others have also called for retaining greater emphasis on components of meaning and self-actualization within the needs pyramid framework (Kesebir et al. 2010, Peterson & Park 2010), and this chimes with an emerging field of research in existential psychology (Vess et al 2009, Schnell 2012, Shaver & Mikulincer 2012a, Batthyany and Russo-Netzer 2014). What remains, however, is to place these drives explicitly within the context and logical implications of an evolutionary analysis like that of Kenrick et al. (2010) — i.e. to consider how these uniquely human drives are likely to have played a critical role in propelling the genes of ancestors into future generations, thus deserving domain-level distinction in the pyramid hierarchy. Indeed, in a response commentary, Kenrick and coauthors seem at least partially sympathetic to this objective: “…perhaps it is worth thinking a bit more deeply about motivations associated with meaning … There is no doubt that, as a result of relatively recent historical circumstances within which human culture and human cognition coevolved, people uniquely attach symbolic meaning to a dazzling array of ideas and artifacts. There is also no doubt that people seek meaning … The bigger question, then, is whether the needs for meaning … have unique implications for reproductive fitness and thus qualify for a place in our pyramid” (Schaller et al. 2010, p. 337).

In later posts, I will argue that they do.

References

Aarssen, L. W. (2010). Darwinism and meaning. Biological Theory, 5, 296–311.

Batthyany, A., & Russo-Netzer, P. (Eds.) (2014). Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology. New York: Springer.

Camus, A. ([1942] 1955). The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays (O’Brien J, trans). New York: Knopf.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2013). Evolutionary psychology: New perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 201–09.

Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘why’’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227–268.

Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2014). The selfish goal: autonomously operating motivational structures as the proximate cause of human judgment and behavior. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 121-175.

Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg,, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 292-314.

Kesebir, S., Graham, J., & Oishi, S. (2010). A theory of human needs should be human-centered, not animal-centered: Commentary on Kenrick et al. (2010). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 315–319.

Klinger, E. (2012). The Search for Meaning in Evolutionary Goal-Theory Perspective. In Wong, P. T. P (Ed.), The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications (2nd edn.), pp. 23-55. New York: Routledge.

MacKenzie, M. J. & Baumeister, R. F. (2014). Meaning in Life: Nature. Needs, and Myths. In P. A. Batthyany and P. Russo-Netzer (eds.), Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, pp. 25-37. New York: Springer.

Maslow, A.H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396.

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2010). What happened to self-actualization? Commentary on Kenrick et al. (2010). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 320–322.

Schaller, M., Neuberg, S.L., Griskevicius, V., & Kenrick, D.T. (2010). Pyramid power: A reply to commentaries. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 335–337.

Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (Eds.) (2012a). Meaning, Mortality, and choice: The Social Psychology of Existential Concerns. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Schnell, T. (2012). An existential turn in psychology. Meaning in life operationalized. Habilitation Treatise. Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck.

Vess, M., Routeldge, C., Landau, M. J, & Arndt, J. (2009). The dynamics of death and meaning: The effects of death-relevant cognitions and personal need for structure on perceptions of meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 728-744.

Why are university researchers still using commercial publishers?

Universities have always been the principal homes and facilitators of scholarly research.  Now they are ready to become its publishers.

With the virtual replacement of paper publication by electronic (online) journal publication, and the coincident emergence of open access, university libraries, in addition to archiving, are now equipped to administer both peer review service and journal publication for the research community that they support.  Even most of the key personnel and expertise — authors, editors, and reviewers — already reside there.  They always have.

Surprisingly, however, commercial publishers still have almost complete control over the publication of university research.  But the wheels are in motion for radical change [1]. Researchers, through a consortium of university libraries, have the power to take over this control with ease — by just deciding to do it.  

Both stand to reap major cost savings.  But even more importantly, a transition to libraries as the principal publishers of university research would open up a badly needed escape route from one of the most crippling limitations on the progress of science and the advance of knowledge:  impact factor (IF) elitism.

Elitism is nothing but varnished bias, dressed up to look innocent and desirable.  But bias is the enemy of science, and stifles the pursuit of knowledge.  It is a baffling twist of irony, therefore, that researchers today are born into a ‘publish or perish’ culture where the central mission is for elitism [2].  This is vigorously indoctrinated by many journal publishers and their editors that are more concerned about preservation and elevation of journal impact factor, and competing with other journals for IF status, than they are concerned with dissemination of discovery.  High impact factor generates profit for commercial publishers because there is a market willing to pay dearly for it:  authors clamouring to find ways to pay for high article processing fees to open access journals; and libraries gouged by high journal subscription fees for reader access.  

This market system—founded upon and sustained purely by elitism—breeds two chronic problems associated with the traditional peer-review model:

Draconian pre-publication peer review filters

Many editors routinely instruct their editorial board members to reject good papers and accept only the ‘best of the best’.  Often they endeavor to disguise this elitism with claims of limited page space for traditional paper publication (despite that virtually no one reads from paper anymore).  Insistence on keeping the space limitations of paper empowers them with a gate-keeping censorship tool for maximizing journal impact factor.  Even when libraries cancel paper subscriptions to save money, their electronic (online only) subscription costs usually remain ridiculously high.    

These unscrupulous rejections by elitist editors delay publication of meritorious research, or leave it unpublished altogether, unavailable to science, lost entirely from the pool of knowledge.  Rejection of their good papers also transforms authors into apathetic or petulant reviewers, conditioned to retaliate with nominal effort, or with aggressive, biased reviewing (recommending in turn the rejection of good papers by other authors), thus maintaining excessively stringent peer review filters [3]. 

Publishers and their editors love this — a self-sustaining mechanism for protecting and inflating IF status, further reinforced by a long-standing tradition of blind and voluntary (free) peer-review.   Because reviewer identities are secret, and the contents of their reviews are not public, callous and aggressive reviewers can ‘hide’ behind anonymity.  This also enables them to exercise power over colleagues — power to approve manuscripts that support the reviewer’s own research and reject those that conflict with it, or those authored by competitors.   This in turn gives editors another tool for rejecting good submissions without ‘looking’ elitist — because they can conveniently ‘pass the buck’ to the anonymous negative reviewer.  And because reviewing is voluntary, with no significant reward for good reviewing service, there are no deterrents for bias, no accountability, and hence no quality control.

Author addiction to chasing impact factor

Young academics are now routinely lured into a culture of chasing IF as a metric of merit.  Despite its poor record for measuring this [4], ‘impact factor mania’ [5] persists, essentially because (as yet) no other alternative measures are widely perceived as equally effective for bolstering academic reputation / status.  In many cases, this addiction leads to exasperation and burn-out, thus breeding susceptibility to academic misconduct.  And when exposed, this results in lost public confidence in the integrity of academic research and the value of funding it. 

This addiction then is what accounts for the exorbitant costs imposed by many publishers; like drug dealers, they are essentially ‘selling’ an elite status symbol to addicted authors through inordinately high author (article processing) fees, and hence to libraries through excessive subscription costs.  Even many open-access online-only journals (with their much lower, paperless operating cost) can get away with charging outrageous author fees for access to their much coveted impact factor [6]  

Madly chasing impact factor leaves not just authors fatigued, but also their reviewers — who are also authors, and hence already fatigued from also chasing impact factor.  Total reviewing time load is multiplied when the same paper is submitted to several journals, as disillusioned authors frantically ratchet down the impact factor ladder, wasting time and resources reformatting and re-submitting papers for different journals (the ‘tragedy of the reviewer commons’).  Everyone is desperately overworked.  With no incentives, willing reviewers have become harder and harder to find; they are fed up with providing free service for journals while their publishers collect exorbitant profits from library subscriptions and author fees.  With never enough hours in the day, requests to review are declined more and more frequently by more and more potential reviewers — thus leaving the real tragedy:  few papers ever get reviewed by the most talented and best qualified reviewers.    

A better way for the future

Traditional elitist journals are unlikely to take the lead in efforts to correct the above problems.  It is in their best interests (for corporate profit generation) to keep the current system in place and to instill complacency about limitations, false pride in the ‘traditional way’, and false confidence in the view that, although not perfect, the current system is the ‘best we can do’.

But it’s not.  The technology for electronic/digital publication — that first allowed us to abandon paper and thus pursue the benefits of open access — has now combined with modern, easily accessible online platforms (for everything from manuscript submission and reviewer management, to editing tools, website hosting, and pdf article production) to provide the means for dispensing with profit-based commercial publishers altogether.  This movement is now starting to gain significant momentum [7] [8], and several institutional libraries [9], including my own at Queen’s University, already host publication of a growing selection of peer-reviewed journals.

Researchers can now easily organize themselves, under an administrative consortium of their institutional libraries, to publish their peer-reviewed, open-access work digitally (online), with author fees kept down to cost-recovery level only — thus leaving more money to support the front-line operating costs of research — and guided by a mission for discovery, rather than a mission for impact factor elitism.  With freedom from the heavy cost burden of library subscription fees to profit-driven publishers, university library budgets will be more than equipped to fund their transformation in becoming the principal non-profit publishers of science and other disciplines, and repositories for digital data and other research products.  The reputations of universities for accountability and commitment to the pursuit of knowledge will also provide branding that can match or exceed the integrity of the biggest multi-national publishers. 

And most importantly, in my view, this new domain for peer-review publication clears the way to break free from the malignant addiction to chasing IF.  Not all researchers will be anxious to walk away from elitism; addiction can have a powerful hold.  But for the brave and forward-thinking, this new opportunity will motivate and enable researchers to experiment broadly with different models [e.g. 10] for identifying and using peer-review filters that are optimal for the progress of science and discovery, and to foster a new merit culture based on ‘author impact factor’ that is earned, rather than journal impact factor elitism, purchased from a profit-hungry commercial publisher. 

What are we waiting for?

  

References

[1]   http://librarypublishing.wordpress.com/category/journal-publishing/

[2]  Aarssen LW, Lortie CJ  (2009) Ending elitism in peer-review publication. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 2: 18-20.   

[3]  Aarssen LW  (2012)  Are peer-review filters optimal for the progress of science in ecology and evolution. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 5: 9-12.

[4]  Eyre-Walker A, Stoletzki N  (2013)  The assessment of science: The relative merits of post-publication review, the Impact Factor, and the number of citations. PLoS Biol 11(10): e1001675. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001675

[5]  CasadevallaA, Fang FC  (2014)  Causes for the persistence of impact factor mania.  mBio 5(2):e00064-14. doi:10.1128/mBio.00064-14.

[6]  Wright JM  (2014)  Open Access and the Public Purse.  Academic Matters July 28, 2014.

[7]  Aarssen, L.W. & Lortie, C.J. 2012. Science Open Reviewed: An online community connecting authors with reviewers for journals.  Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 5: 78-83.

[8] Brembs  B, Button K, Munafo M  (2013)  Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank.  Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:291. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291

[9]  http://www.librarypublishing.org/resources/directory-library-publishing-services

[10]  http://science-open-reviewed.com

The problem with data

The progress of science requires inspiration.  Some researchers find this only from data.  "Show me the evidence", they say.  Many peer-reviewed publications in science, however, have no data.  They involve a different kind of inspiration:  proposals for original ideas or new hypothesis development.  These are found within the 'Forum', 'Perspectives', 'Opinion' and 'Commentary' sections of many journals, and in some journals devoted entirely to new ideas and commentary.

I have always been particularly drawn to the honesty and beauty in this creative brand of enquiry.  And so I am puzzled to see it often dismissed out of hand with pejorative labeling, like ‘hand-waving’ and ‘just-so-stories’.  Many — especially among the elites and self-appointed guardians of established theory — would have us believe that only ‘evidence-based’ practice and products can be taken seriously as legitimate sources of inspiration and discovery in science. 

This is plainly arrogant and wrongheaded.  The scientific method means doing whatever is necessary to get good answers to questions worth asking.  And so data collection that is not guided by interesting, novel, and important ideas is usually boring at best.  At worst, it is a waste of research grant funds.  

But published data are plagued with an even more serious problem:  we never know how much to trust it.  A few minutes of Google searching under the terms "research bias", "scientific misconduct", and "publication bias" shows that the follies of faith in published data have come sharply and painfully into the public spotlight in recent years.  Data are also subject to measurement and recording errors, and are often not replicated, in some cases because they can't be, e.g. when collection materials or settings are not repeatable (which is often the case in my own field of research in ecology and evolution).  

Well-established researchers have always been privately aware of these troubling limitations of published data, and many have had direct knowledge of the scale of the problem — usually while showing a brave face for the public, intimating that the scientific establishment is virtuous, and it’s integrity (save for a few ‘isolated cases’), rock solid.  

This would be amusing if it weren't so egregious and pathetic. 

Good data will of course always contribute importantly to the progress of science, and in a perfect world, ‘evidence-based’ would be the gold standard.  But unfortunately, proclamations of evidence are rarely free of suspicion.  Both researchers and the general public are well-advised to be wary of the potential for false confidence, questionable inspiration, and misguided recommendations.  

Remedies for the data problem remain an important challenge for researchers.  In the meantime, however, a rich and reliable source of inspiration  — thankfully — remains strong in supporting the progress of science:  published ideas and stories.  Write them, publish them, read them, challenge them, revise them, and be inspired!