Alex McLean

Best known and wrong: Dreyfus and Dreyfus

Since dipping my toe into cross-disciplinary research, I’ve noticed that it seems the best known results of a field are often derided or ignored within the field.  For example:

• Speech perception: Motor theory – based on outmoded idea of there being a special module that evolved for speech perception and action
• Linguistics: Inuit words for snow – it turns out that they don’t have a particularly large number
• Neuropsychology: We draw things using one side of the brain and do maths with the other – it’s a bit more complicated than that I believe, although I’d like to know more..
• Psychology of emotion (?): Kübler-Ross model – the model of five stages of grief doesn’t have any experimental basis
• Music psychology: Mozart effect – rather questionable hypothesis, with conflict of interest, that doesn’t seem to be replicable (except to the extent that it’s also true of death metal). I’ve not met any music psychologists who take this at all seriously.

I’d be interested to hear of more examples..

I guess research is nuanced, and ideas that can be understood from bite-sized quotes get ingrained in folklore over a couple of decades and are impossible to dislodge if/when they are superseded.

These things really get in the way of understanding of a field though. For example Alan Blackwell’s pioneering masters module on programming language usability found its way on to reddit lately.  One commenter couldn’t understand how the course text could have a chapter on “Acquisition of Programming Knowledge and Skills” without referencing the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition.  The Dreyfus model is detailed in a 30 year old paper, which while is enjoyable to read, does not introduce any empirical research, makes some arbitrary distinctions and does not seem to figure in any contemporary field of academic research.  In their paper, Dreyfus and Dreyfus suggest  that people should not learn by exploration and experimentation, but by reading manuals and theoretical instruction structured around five discrete modes of learning.  It is surprising then that this model appears to be highly regarded among agile development proponents, who through a lot of squinting manage to fit it to the five stages of becoming an agile developer.  For example this talk by Patrick Kua somehow invokes homeopathy in support of this rather fragile application of Dreyfus’ air pilot training manual design to agile development.

On the surface this seems fairly harmless pseudoscience, but for anyone trying to take a more nuanced view of applied research in software development practices, it can be extremely irritating.  There is no reason why Rogalski and Samurçay should mention Dreyfus’s model in their review of programming skills acquisition, but because it is fashionable amongst agile development coaches, its absence seems unforgivable by agile practitioners.  This reddit thread is a clear case where pseudoscience can act as a serious barrier in dialogue between research and practice.

That said, I’m quite naive both about agile development and education studies, so am very happy to be enlightened on any of the above.

To add on a positive note, perhaps the answer to this is open scholarship.  As campaigning and funding organisations lead us towards a future where all public funded research is freely available, practitioners are increasingly able to immerse themselves in real, contemporary research.  Perhaps then over-simplistic and superseded ghosts from the past will finally be replaced, so we can live our lives informed by more nuanced understanding of ourselves.