Dr. Sven van de Wetering, Interest of Psychology, Research, and Controversial Topics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/14
Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we discuss his background and views, part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education?
I did my education all over. I went to grade school at various schools in Powell River, Greater Vancouver, and Calgary, including three alternative schools: the Oxford House of Knowledge (an extremely unpretentious place that happened to be on Oxford Street), the Ideal School (which didn’t quite live up to its name but was a big step up from conventional schools), and, in Calgary, the Alternative High School.
I received a B.Sc. in biology at UBC in 1983. Then, after some years of drift, I went back to school in 1988 and studied psychology at Concordia University in Montreal (though I spent a visiting year at Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany), got my B.A. in psychology in 1992, then spent the next ten years doing my graduate work at SFU.
Jacobsen: Why did you pursue that field of study? How did psychology interest to you?
I originally intended to be a clinician. I was working in a home for the mentally handicapped in 1988, and was quite burned out, but thought the work was important and wanted to pursue it at a higher level. I thought clinical psychology was the field for me. Of course, that didn’t quite work out.
Jacobsen: What topics have you researched in your career?
I have researched only a restricted range of topics in my empirical research career. As an undergraduate, I was looking at belief in the paranormal. As a masters student I tried to develop a relatively nonreactive measure of prejudice, then as a doctoral student, I stayed in the area of prejudice, but tried to study whether people use gossip as a technique to incite prejudice in others. Once I started teaching full time, I could only do one project a year, but have looked at things like beliefs about the nature of evil, predictors of people’s car purchase decisions (this was in an environmental context), a couple of studies on system justification theory. My last several studies have had a very striking tendency to produce null results.
Jacobsen: What areas are you currently researching?
If I can ever get it up and running, I hope to conduct a study on the relationship between narcissism and political attitudes. It’ll be a correlational study, and I’ll probably toss in a whole bunch of variables in the hopes of finding something.
Jacobsen: How do you engage in research? What methodologies do you employ?
My methodology tends to be very straightforward, either simple correlational studies or experimental studies with just one or two variables manipulated. Most of the time this is done using simple paper-and-pencil measures, but sometimes I’ll do something a little fancier in an attempt to assess implicit cognition.
Jacobsen: Within the field of psychology, what do you consider the most controversial topics? How do you examine the debates pertaining to these topics?
If one takes “controversial” to mean that everyone has a very strong opinion about the issue, and the opinions aren’t all the same, I would have to say that number one is still the status of psychoanalysis. A determined minority of psychologists still considers Freud half a step below God, a majority seem to think of him as some deluded anti-empirical megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and no data, and not many psychologists sit on the fence about this. I may be one of them, though. The number of issues on which Freud may have been right is slowly growing in my mind, and I’m not quite as ready to dismiss him as I once was. To be honest, I barely examine this issue at all, though. Just in a few isolated moments, I think “Hey! Freud may be right about that!”
Another debate of the same ilk concerns the status of evolutionary thinking in psychology. Relatively few academic psychologists actually deny that human evolution has occurred. The issue is more whether the fact of our having evolved actually furnishes significant insights into current human psychology. This is a thorny issue that I do have to deal with on a fairly regular basis, and I must confess that my strategy here is to read the arguments on both sides, and then come to an informed decision based largely on intuition.
The most troubling argument I have heard goes something like this: “Evolutionary psychology promotes patriarchy.” I don’t think it does; at least, there are a number of feminist evolutionary psychologists out there, one of whom I know personally. Furthermore, having taught evolutionary psychology, I’ve gotten the impression that there is almost no other point of view so very good at making a lot of typical male dominance behaviors look completely ridiculous. Nevertheless, I must admit that, when I go to evolutionary psychology conferences, I do get the impression that the typical evolutionary psychologist is somewhat to the political right of the typical non-evolutionary psychologist.
What disturbs me about the argument though, is the idea that an idea should be suppressed if it has negative consequences, even if it happens to be true. I feel ambivalent about this idea but tend to think that suppressing potentially true ideas is, if not always wrong, at least almost always wrong. The quest for truth is what got me into academic life in the first place, and I find the idea that we should hide the truth distasteful and potentially destructive.
A third controversy that doesn’t so much play out within psychology but instead between psychologists and other fields in the humanities and social sciences is whether there is such a thing as human nature at all. Most psychologists who are not behaviorists will answer this in the affirmative, but some learning theorists and many anthropologists and sociologists will contend that human behavior is almost infinitely plastic and that those who seek to find an enduring core to human nature will find nothing but sand. Given the large number of cross-cultural universals we have found that also seem to be thoroughly anchored in individual human development, I find the idea of an infinitely plastic human nature odd and contrary to all evidence I am aware of. This is not a dispute I spend a lot of time on; I’ve never yet heard a decent argument from the infinite plasticity camp, and so I consider it a big waste of time.
Please note that I am not contending that there is no plasticity; clearly, there is. Learning takes place, cultures differ, and the brain rewires itself under certain circumstances. My objection is only to the idea that these processes are so all-encompassing that there is no longer an unchanging core that is resistant to these processes.
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