In this post I will share:
- How technology shapes the way we understand the mind
- Why metaphors in psychology reflect our own era
- How modern tools have transformed behavioral research
- Why good research design matters more than any tool
As the Yiddish proverb goes, “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”
This is often understood as a commentary on perspective: we see the world through our experiences and what surrounds us is invisible. The worm doesn’t know it lives in horseradish, because horseradish is all there is.
Scientists, it turns out, are sometimes like the worm.
The Tools We Forget We’re Using: How Technology Shaped Psychology
People often forget that science is shaped by tools and technology. Consider the history of how psychologists have understood the mind.
In the age of hydraulics and steam, psychologists described the psyche as a system of pressures—drives that build up and must be released, energy that flows through channels and gets blocked. The mind was a boiler. Repress too much and something bursts.
Later, when telephone switchboards connected cities, the brain became an operator. Psychologists suggested the brain receives signals and routes them to the appropriate destination. Behaviorists loved this analogy. It meant that organisms could operate based on stimulus and response, with nothing interesting happening inside.
Then came the computer. Now, the mind was an information processor. People spoke of encoding and retrieval, of working memory, and of cognitive load and processing speed. The metaphor was so natural people forgot it was a metaphor.
Today, we’re surrounded by neural networks and large language models. The vocabulary is already shifting. You might hear that the brain “trains” on experience, or that memories are “weights” that get updated. People don’t retrieve information anymore; they “generate” it.
None of these metaphors are wrong, but none are exactly right. Each metaphor reflects the technology that surrounded behavioral scientists at the time—the horseradish they swam in without noticing.
Why do these frameworks change?
As I explain in my introductory psychology course, psychologists are people, shaped by the same cultural and technological currents as everyone else. But more important than trends, technology changes the tools researchers use. And, in science, tools don’t just enable work; they shape the questions that get asked.
What Are Behavioral Research Tools?
Behavioral research tools are the platforms, software, and technologies that scientists use to study human behavior. They include participant recruitment platforms (like CloudResearch Connect, Prolific, and Lucid), survey software (like CloudResearch Engage and Qualtrics), statistical analysis programs (like SPSS, R, and Jamovi), and literature databases (like Google Scholar and PsycINFO).
These tools have transformed behavioral science by making research faster, cheaper, and more accessible. A study that once took months can now be completed in days. Samples that were once limited to college students can now include participants from around the world.
The Modern Tools of Behavioral Research
The history of how research tools shape science matters today because we are living in another transformation, one that is happening fast. The tools used for social and behavioral research have changed more in the past fifteen years than in the previous fifty—and this doesn’t account for AI.
Online Participant Recruitment
The online platforms researchers use to find study participants are important tools. Before online research, participant recruitment was slow, expensive (either in time or money), and constrained. Researchers could often only find people in their local community. Today, it’s possible to quickly survey people from all over the world, at an affordable price.
Easy access to participants has improved the quality of research. Studies today have larger samples of more diverse participants. It’s also made research faster, allowing scientists to study people’s reactions to breaking news as events unfold. And it has opened the door to more complex questions, like how mental health changes over time or in response to new technologies. Although some initially saw little value in online research—one paper derided it as the psychology of finger movements—its influence on research today is undeniable.
Survey Tools and Data Collection
In tandem with participant recruitment, behavioral scientists use sophisticated tools to gather data. Among these are the survey tools researchers use to conduct experiments and gather self-reported responses. Tools like CloudResearch Engage, Qualtrics, or dozens of others allow anyone to create professional questionnaires and experiments without any programming knowledge.
Literature Review and Data Analysis Tools
Beyond recruitment and data collection, behavioral scientists rely on tools for finding research articles, analyzing data, and sharing results. Chapter 2 introduces you to some of these tools: Google Scholar, SPSS, and the Open Science Framework (OSF). Later chapters will demonstrate how to use them.
What’s in Chapter 2: A Hands-On Guide to Research Tools
Chapter 2 begins with the participant platforms that have become common in behavioral research. To understand how these platforms work, you’ll create an account on CloudResearch Connect and complete a few studies yourself. In doing so, you’ll explore research from the inside, as a participant.
The chapter then walks you through the tools that make online research possible.
You’ll start by learning to navigate the research literature, using Google Scholar and understanding the “pyramid of scientific knowledge,” which runs from peer-reviewed journals at the base to popular books and well-known theories at the top. Then, you will explore how to design a study and gather data. The chapter presents different categories of research tools, highlighting how survey platforms let researchers design experiments and questionnaires without writing a single line of code.
Finally, the chapter ends by examining the tools that allow researchers to analyze data and share their research with others.
While it’s easy to marvel at technological progress, Chapter 2 contains an important admonition: remember that even the most sophisticated tools are just that—tools. Like a hammer, tractor, scalpel, or fermenter, the value of behavioral research tools comes from the ability of a knowledgeable researcher to apply them toward a thoughtfully chosen goal. Sophisticated technology cannot compensate for poor design. That is why Chapters 3-7 focus on designing different kinds of studies.
This post is part of a series exploring the chapters of Research in the Cloud: An Introduction to Modern Methods in Behavioral Science by Aaron Moss, Jonathan Robinson, and Leib Litman.
Ready to learn? Read Chapter 2 for free here.