image description
Volume 14, Issue6July/August 2001

Presidential Column

John Darley
John Darley
Princeton University
APS President 2001 - 2002
All columns

In this Issue:
The Tradition of Experimentalism in Psychology

About the Observer

Published 6 times per year by the Association for Psychological Science, the Observer educates and informs on matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology; promotes the scientific values of APS members; reports on issues of international interest to the psychological science community; and provides a vehicle for the dissemination on information about APS.

APS members receive the Observer newsletter and may access the online archive going back to 1988.

Looking to connect with the Observer? Visit the About page to learn about writing for us, advertising, reprints, and more. We’d love to hear from you. If you have questions about your subscription, please email APS@psychologicalscience.org.

Latest Under the Cortex Podcast

thumb image

Trending Topics >


  • Thumbnail Image for Myths and Misinformation

    Myths and Misinformation

    How does misinformation spread and how do we combat it? Psychological science sheds light on the mechanisms underlying misinformation and ‘fake news.’

Up Front


  • The Tradition of Experimentalism in Psychology

    It sometimes makes sense to examine a discipline in terms of what I am tempted to call its "tribal customs." By this I mean its habitual, frequently unexamined, ways of doing its everyday activities and communicating about the results of those activities both to itself and to adjacent tribes. Continuing the metaphor, it is useful to compare the customs of psychology with scientifically adjacent tribes such as sociology, cognitive science, and anthropology, and even more distant tribes such as literary criticism and philosophy. One reason for this sort of examination is celebratory - to revel in the superiority of the customs of our discipline over those of the adjacent disciplines.