Future Challenges for Applied Experimental Psychology 663FUTURE CHALLENGES FOR APPLIED
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Practical challenges for experimental psychology come from
many quarters. Without any claim of exhaustiveness, we
mention three major (not entirely independent) categories—
psychological, social, and technological—and give some ex-
amples of each. Many of the examples could be placed in
more than one category. A better understanding of aging, for
example, is desirable for individuals who must deal with its
effects in their personal lives, for institutions that must re-
spond to the social implications of an aging populace, and for
technologists who want their products to be usable by elderly
people. A similar comment could be made with respect to the
problem of designing devices and environments to increase
accessibility of resources for people with various types of
disabilities, or with respect to many other topics. For conve-
nience, however, we place each example in only one cate-
gory, even when it requires a bit of arbitrariness to do so.
Psychological
A better understanding of basic cognitive processes of learn-
ing, thinking, decision making, problem solving, and the like
is important for both theoretical and practical reasons. Much
research on these topics is motivated primarily by an interest
in advancing psychological theory—broadening and deepen-
ing the knowledge base represented by psychology as a
science. But each of these topics is important also from a
practical point of view. Educational goals and techniques, for
example, need to be informed by a clear understanding of
how children learn and of what facilitates or inhibits learning.
Can experiments be done that will shed light on why peo-
ple do things (smoke, intentionally expose themselves to ex-
cessive sunlight, take illicit drugs, engage in risky driving,
etc.) that are known to be harmful to them or to have a high
probability of being so? Can such experiments reveal effec-
tive ways of decreasing the likelihood of high-risk behavior?
Essentially, any form of unnecessarily risky behavior repre-
sents a challenge to research to explain it and perhaps to
find a way to modify it. Consider, for illustrative purposes,
risky driving. Automobile accidents remain a major cause of
accidental death in the United States and most other industri-
alized countries, and this despite the considerable improve-
ments that have been made in automobiles and highways
from a safety point of view over the last few decades. It is
clear that many automotive deaths are the direct result of
risky driving—driving too fast, driving while drinking, fol-
lowing leading vehicles too closely, running traffic lights,
passing with insufficient forward vision, failing to use seat
belts, driving vehicles that are in ill repair, and purposefully
using a vehicle as a weapon (road rage).
In any particular case of risky driving, it could be either
that the driver underestimates the magnitude of the risk that
is being taken or that he or she is fully aware of the risk and is
taking it willingly. The driver in the first situation is analogous
to a person who skates on thin ice believing it to be thick; the
one in the second to a person who willingly skates on ice that
he or she knows to be thin. The distinction is important for
practical purposes because the two cases call for different ap-
proaches to modifying the risky behavior: The first calls for
finding a way to make the driver aware of the risk that is being
taken; the second requires something more than effecting this
awareness, which the driver already has.
Documented egocentric biases of various sorts may be
causal factors in risky behavior. Many investigators have
found that people tend to consider specified positive events to
be more likely to happen to themselves than to another person,
and to consider specified negative events to be more likely to
happen to someone else than to themselves (Dunning, 1993;
D. M. Harris & Guten, 1979; Linville, Fischer, & Fischhoff,
1993). People appear to be likely to discount the seriousness
of a risk if they believe themselves to be especially suscepti-
ble to it (Block & Keller, 1995; Ditto, Jemmott, & Darley,
1988; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Kunda, 1987). Such egocentric
biases have shown up in the tendency of drivers to consider
themselves more expert and safer than average (Svenson,
1981; Svenson, Fischhoff, & MacGregor, 1985) and in people
judging their chances of being involved in an automobile ac-
cident to be higher when they are a passenger in an automo-
bile than when driving it themselves (Greening & Chandler,
1997; McKenna, 1993; McKenna, Stanier & Lewis, 1991).
The question of how people can be made better aware of the
real risks that they are taking in specific cases is a major chal-
lenge for future research.SocialIn 1998 representatives from more than 90 organizations con-
cerned with scientific psychology convened a summit that be-
came known as the 1998 Summit of Psychological Science
Societies. Emerging from this meeting was a resolution com-
posed of six recommendations, the fourth of which called
upon “psychological scientists to equip themselves and their
students and to educate the public to address the issues of im-
portance to society” (“Summit ‘98,” 1998, p. 14). This reso-
lution is in keeping with other evidences, mentioned earlier in
this chapter, of the currently strong interest among research