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Breaking Up Ain’t Hard To Do. (OR Why Psychology Is A Soft Science)
(PHOTO: Walter Groesel)
Check out this story about a study on the predicted and then actual emotional distress suffered from relationship break-up published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The authors conclude that people are far more scared of the heart ache, and estimate it will be cataclysmic, but after following 69 people for about a year, they found that the break up was never as bad as they expected. Nice.
Only caveat being: these were UNIVERSITY FRESHMEN. Are you kidding? I mean seriously. Of course they think it’s going to be horrible - they are melodramatic teenagers living without parents and in close quarters to the opposite sex and mucho beer for the first time in their lives. And of course they aren’t really that upset because they probably started seeing someone else in like 12 minutes.
Undergrads are the bread and butter of psych research, and most times that’s okay. But come on. You want to generalize about relationship behavior from people who think making out at a kegger on a puke-stained sofa is the start of something beautiful?
Comments
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I know I know. But I couldn’t help myself from spurning. This study pointed out an interesting - though perhaps more technical - contradiction between how bad we think it’s gonna be and how bad it is and, as you point out, where that error comes from.
(here’s a link to the abstract btw, if anyone cares http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJB-4P59XGX-1&_user=10&_coverDate=07/10/2007&_rdoc=16&_fmt=summary&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(#toc#6874#9999#999999999#99999#FLA#display#Articles)&_cdi=6874&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=98&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2bba2ef70c6675beb5d289eb909202c8)
But honestly, it doesn’t really alter my criticism. If we weighed up the bulk of social psychology and personality research conducted on undergraduate students, it would be amazing.
That’s not to say it isn’t valid, well-designed and controlled, it’s just that undergraduate life is amongst the weirdest, most hectic, changing, stressful and dynamic times in someone’s life. This just seemed a particular egregious case of pretending that college kids are normal humans.
My experience of having been one, listening to the romantic woes of my cousin who currently IS one, lead me to believe that college kids aren’t normal people.
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Dude, bad headline!!
And I don’t think that they’re trying to generalize to all romantic relationships, they’re trying to generalize to misprediction of future emotion, and why we’re so bad at it (tending to exaggerate the future emotional impact of an event).
The main point and purpose of the study was to figure out whether that our errors of prediction are due to misprediction of initial reaction or to misprediction of the rate of decay/dissipation of emotion… and they find for the former only. I don’t know if this is still vulnerable to your criticisms, because we can probably assume that it’s one or the other (or both), and if each could be magnified in an undergrad population as you point out, then the fact that they find no contribution of the latter would still be decent evidence for concluding for the former, no?