Picking Your Hill - A Personal Story

The experiments that got you excited to study psychology are probably incorrect.

Motivation in psychology involves picking a hill to die on.
When I started my Master's degree, I wanted to study meditation. I read some literature and my critical eye found problems. Lots of problems. Then, I went to a major meditation conference and discovered that I couldn't relate to anyone there. The conference was so full of "woo woo" and methodologically dubious research that I ended up thinking, "These are not my people".

When I returned from the conference, I was in a funk.
I was disheartened. I explained my experience to my supervisor, a well-respected expert in the meditation field. My supervisor agreed with my observation that much of the existing meditation research was very flawed, to put it mildly. In fact, a growing number of researchers from within the field were raising doubts, growing ever more vocal and internally critical of dubious research, especially of inadequate methods. My supervisor re-framed this as an opportunity: he saw the flawed research and reasoned that we could have a considerable impact by doing higher-quality research. Many "low-hanging fruit" questions regarding meditation remained inadequately answered so researchers with more rigorous methods could really make a name for themselves.

That's what he did, after all. He made a name for himself as a particularly excellent researcher in the field.

I thought about this.
I thought about this a lot.

Ultimately, I decided to abandon meditation as a primary research area.
Meditation is not my hill to die on. My deeper interest is meta-awareness and I was interested in meditation as a tool for investigating meta-awareness rather than meditation for its own sake. Don't get me wrong; I practice daily meditation and I have seen its benefits for myself. I'm just not inspired to study it for its own sake.

The moral of the story is that some choices are about picking your hill.
If you get inspired to do amazing research in some area, you can! Doing rigorous research is non-trivial and, unfortunately, the Replication Crisis has revealed that the existing literatures of most sub-fields are non-replicable. With such a dubious foundation, you need to be ready to think from first principles and build your way up to a new understanding.

Building up from first principles takes time and dedication.
Starting from scratch often means that there may be questions that you find compelling, but that you cannot hope to address yet. Many questions presuppose that some existing theory is correct or some published study was valid, but you won't be able to trust this without replicating the research yourself. In psychology, we're standing on the shoulders of some very wobbly giants.

My supervisor was right: this is an opportunity.
If this sounds discouraging, it need not be in the end. Let this problem disillusion you, but don't let it discourage you completely. We need new scientists willing to face the crisis the field is in. Yes, the past has left us in a challenging position, but the past does not dictate our future. The path to fulfilling research is long and you will need persistence and motivation to get there. Motivation involves picking a hill to die on.

Don't die on someone else's hill.

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