You're gonna run when you find out who I am.

Meehl's Philosophical Psychology, Lecture 8, part 6.

This post digs into Lecture 8 of Paul Meehl’s course “Philosophical Psychology.” You can watch the video here. Here’s the full table of contents of my blogging through the class.

One of the central suggestions Meehl advances to improve the interpretability of the scientific literature is less publication. Or, perhaps a bit more accurately, he calls for less pressure to publish. Less pressure would be better for researchers because it would reduce stress and improve their mental health. It would be better for society because so much published research is bad. It would be better for the scientific literature as it would open the opportunity to think more deeply about theory testing.

Meehl worries

“Today, there's something about the academic culture that has become almost sick as regards to the [number] of publications. One of the main forms it takes now is 37 authors in a single paper. it turns out that all Joe Blow ever had to do with it was to say yep. It’s really become absurd. The pressure when you're hiring a fresh-baked PhD is to look at how many publications that person had. He hadn’t even finished his thesis yet. When I see somebody with 20 pre PhD publications in fact I tend to get a little suspicious. I mean how good can they be, after all?”

Does that sound familiar? Hearing a recapitulation of my own argument in a video recorded 35 years ago was unnerving.

Meehl’s had some proposals for how to fix the problem, and they all failed. Meehl had the quaint idea that we should count citations rather than publications. But that was before the internet made it easy to track your stats. Maxing h-index instead of paper counts was, if anything, worse. People figured out how to run citation rings and game the metrics. Meehl also called for dean’s offices to implement more holistic evaluation of tenure cases. But no matter how many memos central campus sends stating that your teaching and service matter as much as your research, people still just count papers.

People have known that publish-or-perish is a harmful, dangerous problem since at least the 1980s. Why has it only gotten worse? You might say Meehl’s proposals weren’t implemented correctly. That if we were more thoughtful and had a more agile academy, we could make everyone happier. That we could technocratically engineer a more perfect literature.

But let me advance an alternative hypothesis seldom discussed at academic committee meetings or in surveys by serious metascientists.

What if the problem is us?

Late in the lecture, after remarking that he thinks psychology would be no worse off if 4 out of 5 people stopped publishing, Meehl muses about why people don’t stop publishing. The most successful people feel the most pressure to publish even more. Even Nobel Prize winners think they still have to prove their merit and keep churning out results.

At this point, Meehl goes off script and puts on his psychoanalyst hat. He remarks that all academics seem to suffer from a “What Have You Done For Me Lately” syndrome.¹ Meehl relates a story from Nevitt Sanford, who ran pioneering psychological studies at Berkeley’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. 

Some of Sanford’s most famous work aimed to understand the psychology of the successful. Sanford recruited many Bay Area elites as subjects. He assessed Berkeley scientists, expert surgeons, famous musicians, artists, and poets psychologically. The people in his studies were all high-achieving, high-visibility volunteers from the community. 

Sanford had found that these successful people almost all shared the same pathology. Except for one or two psychopaths, they all had imposter syndrome. Meehl related one extreme case:

“Of course I got to be head of Neurosurgery at the age of 39 which is unusual but I really wonder sometimes how did I fool all these people? you know I'm really not that good. What the hell am I doing here? I’m going to stick a knife in some guy’s brain?”

Meehl observed the same phenomenon in his own psychological service. Most of his recent patients had been academics, and he saw precisely what Sanford had seen.

“My experience with treating college professors is that the unsuccessful, the moderately successful, and the super successful all talk the same way in psychotherapy. They all think they're not doing quite as well as they could or should given their IQ. Or alternatively, ‘How did I ever get to have such status since I'm not as bright as my brother whose IQ is 180?’ Or, ‘How did I fool so many people? Will they catch on to me that I'm not really as smart as I appear to be?’ It’s practically universal.”

Does this sound familiar to you?

I’m left with a far too plausible explanation for overpublication. We fund an exponential expansion of the academy after World War II. This creates an expansion of paper writing. Professors need to do more to feel worthwhile. We make mechanical reproduction frictionless. We can instantly generate pdfs to send to our friends. And here we are. What if all we can do is drown in papers? What if it’s an unavoidable psychosociological state? I suppose I now have a theory that I can test. Be right back, I have to go write a paper.

If this psychosociological explanation is verisimilitudinous, there’s a solution to overpublication. And it’s terrifying. A few years ago, I had grown worried about the problem and tried to pull back. The pandemic lockdowns provided a convenient excuse to tap out entirely. You can do some analytics on my Google Scholar profile if you want, but I’m down to writing a few papers a year. I like those papers a lot! But it’s been a conscious effort. Fewer papers, fewer graduate students. Less.

And yet, I would be lying if I said it didn’t feel like I have been actively committing career suicide for half a decade. Shouldn’t I be writing more? What if I stop getting invited to meetings? What if I stop getting grants? You might have noticed that I blog a lot. Is that some sort of coping mechanism? Hold on, let me call a therapist.

More seriously, I still sincerely believe that less is better. It might be natural to publish more, but that doesn’t mean I can’t actively work to publish less. I think my blogs, en masse, have been no less valuable than the ensemble of 90% of my papers. I’ve been enjoying spending more time on my courses. I love writing books. Maybe this model is OK for a tenured Professor of EECS at Berkeley? I suppose we’ll find out at my next merit review.

Meehl suggests we all just relax. Accept that the relentless what-have-you-done-for me-lately syndrome and imposter syndrome are normal states of mind. Do some rational emotive behavior therapy. Or practice Buddhism. Or pause and consider, “What does it matter when the sun burns out?” The constant pressure to succeed isn’t “healthy” by any conventional psychological definition. And not engaging with it won’t make it go away.

1. He calls this particular trait something that I can’t decipher. He either says “N adj or N edge.” See his discussion at 1:05:00 in the video. If anyone knows what he is referring to here, please let me know.