What Does the Future Hold for Psychological Science?

More than 2,000 research psychologists gathered in Washington, D.C., in May against the backdrop of growing hostility toward higher education, continued concerns about scientific rigor, and the growing and often worrisome impact of AI on research and education.

Programming at the APS 37^th Annual Convention included substantial focus on science advocacy and the pursuit of funding sources that could replace the alarming cuts in U.S. government research support. A convention symposium titled Building the Future of Psychological Science featured a panel of APS fellows who shared insights into many other challenges the field faces in the coming years.

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“We are seeing pressures from things like technology, generative AI,” said Melissa Keith, an industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologist at Bowling Green State University. “We are also seeing increased pressure from federal and state governments, and of course, we’re also seeing increased distrust of higher education throughout the nation.” 

The panelists, as well as scholars who attended the symposium, discussed what they view as the most pressing concerns facing the field, as well as some ideas on how to address them. Below is a sample of their ideas, concerns, and forecasts. 

Funding 

Myra Fernandes, University of Waterloo 
“One of the big things that we want to think about is promoting intercountry collaborations, where grant support is spread out across countries—with funding bases for perhaps common projects that are coming from a variety of different countries instead of just one—to protect against challenges in certain countries with respect to securing and maintaining those grants.  

A very important aspect that needs to be considered is, with anti-science influence in society today, making our science more relevant and accountable to taxpayers, who are the ones who are providing the funds for these grants.”  

Margaret Beier, Rice University 
“I’ve really been thinking a lot about this bridge between basic and applied science and how to actually make our work more relevant. Because I think this will address the funding issue. We need people to know how what we do affects their daily life so that they can endorse funding for science in this area. 

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I think about this from a really macro perspective. I’m an industrial organizational psychologist. We study behavior within organizations, but there are all kinds of things—the economic climate, the COVID pandemic—that affect the experience of daily work and life. I think we’ve ignored these things for so long at our peril, and it makes us not relevant. And so to make ourselves more relevant, I think we have to engage with those sciences that deal with these issues on a more macro level.” 

Scientific advancement

William P. Hetrick, Indiana University 
“From the clinical science perspective, we have not done anything to bend the curve on the burden of mental health for 4 decades. Our discipline, clinical psychology, is maybe at the core of understanding the etiology of mental health disorders, understanding and developing cutting-edge treatments, and being a part of that implementation process. The data are that there is no decrease in the prevalence of the major disorders that we face. It’s a reckoning issue that comes to the core of what we can do for the public good.”  

Reeshad Dalal, George Mason University 
“We are still in the midst of the replication crisis, believe it or not. Many of our iconic findings just don’t seem to replicate. I’m an industrial organizational psychologist. I/O has not yet experienced the replication crisis to as great an extent as other disciplines. And perhaps because of that, there’s a lot of ‘ostrich head-in-the-sand’ thinking—‘Oh, that doesn’t affect us. That’s something for social psychologists to worry about.’  Well, I think that’s not true. I think we just haven’t bothered to look, and if we look, we’ll find we have exactly the same problem. Yet there seems to be no appetite in I/O to tackle this problem. There seems to be a startling lack of knowledge and appreciation of the importance of replication, including direct replication. There are also very few vehicles, whether that is conferences or I/O journals or general journals that publish I/O work, that routinely have space for replication.” 

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Fernandes 
“Encouraging people to create trust in society for science really starts with grassroots movements—talking to schools, talking at clubs, talking to various groups about the importance and relevance of our work and its applicability in the real world. 

Integrated into our usual areas of communication is, when we publish papers, we’re paying attention to or incorporating public significance statements that summarize our results that we’ve used to come up with the answers to the questions that we feel are relevant. It’s also a chance for us to explain why we think certain research questions are important to answer.  

I think we could also consider including multilanguage abstracts. That means maybe asking journals if it’s possible to publish the abstract of your work in another language, or maybe even in your home language if it’s not English. That could promote worldwide consideration of the importance of the work.” 

Cross-boundary collaboration

APS Board Member Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University 
“I think a lot about global science. I think APS has made great strides to try to be a more global society. The number of non-U.S. members has really increased. Now’s the time when we really need to come together, and there are so many threats to that happening with the way these dialogs and political conversations are going. So hopefully we can harness those collections across cultures, across societies and as part of a better, more representative science, and we can also find ways to work together in unique and creative ways.” 

Hetrick 
“We’re a hub science because of the fact that we interact very well with education and policy, economics, computer science, and so on. I think we need to make sure to actively preserve that—in particular, our relationship with neuroscience. I think that’s one place we have to be particularly vigilant, and that will be important for trainees in the future. But also in terms of cognitive science, and in terms of informatics, computer science, public health, health, and economics. These are areas in which the edges, the connections between us as a hub and these other nodes will be critical for training and research.” 

Technology 

Hetrick 
“Generative AI may replace us as instructors. It may fundamentally change the university. It may lead to the obsolescence of the traditional classroom teaching environment, essentially. And I think that we have to think of generative AI, not only in the context of teaching, but in the context of research, in the context of service provision. I think that what that means is that we probably challenge ourselves to increase AI literacy and various things that would allow us to integrate generative AI in what we do.” 

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Gutchess 
“AI is dramatically changing very quickly what we do but also presenting opportunities for how we can look at data in very rich ways that I’m just trying to get my head around now.” 

Career development 

Hetrick 
“I think in disciplines like social psychology and cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, there are opportunities. If we can create good partnerships with industry and think about how to test our research theories in more practical ways, faculty might create meaningful relationships with industry. 

We need to think very differently about our training models and open up opportunities for applied internships, for nonclinical students to engage in these types of pathways that then might lead to nonacademic jobs. And then what we need to do is to recognize those, as departments and as faculty, as really good outcomes. These are scientists of the first rank working on interesting problems in industry that are worth value.” 

Beier 
“I think it would help us if we had faculty members who had a little bit more industry experience. Because what we’re asking is, we’re asking people who have no industry experience to promote those jobs, or to really communicate what are the skills you have now that could apply to these certain jobs. So I do think we need to do a better job of reaching out to different industries.” 

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