Illusory essences: A bias holding back theorizing in psychological science

The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence; attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the 'vital forces' previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. We describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena by synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, clinical, and biological psychology and neuroscience. Labeling a complex phenomenon can appear as theoretical progress before sufficient evidence that the described category has a definable essence or known boundary conditions. Category labels can further undermine progress by masking contingent and contextual relationships and obscuring the need to specify mechanisms. Finally, we highlight examples of promising methods that circumvent the lure of essences and we suggest four concrete strategies to identify and avoid essentialist intuitions in theory development.

Biopsychology

The study of biopsychology seeks to describe the physiological mechanisms of the body that mediate our movement and mental activity. Biopsychology focuses on biological basis of behavior (i.e., how brain and other biological processes affect psychological behaviors). Biopsychology is also known as biological psychology or psychobiology. Biopsychology is the application of the principles of biology to the study of mental processes and behavior that is the study of psychology in terms of bodily mechanisms.