Chapter 7: Remembering Methodology: Experimenting with Bartlett

The title of this chapter has a double meaning. On the one hand, it delineates the area of psychological inquiry that this chapter is concerned with: experimental methodologies for the study of remembering. On the other hand, it suggests that methodological thinking has, in part, been forgotten by psychology, and that this chapter is an act of remembering to think methodologically. With this second meaning, I wish to evoke Danziger’s (1990) diagnosis of contemporary psychology as practicing “methodolatry,” the unthinking acceptance and practice of one single methodology, namely, the analysis of aggregates by means of statistical techniques to make predictions at the level of populations. This methodology is unfit to explore questions about “meaning,” among other important psychological phenomena (Michell, 2004). The present chapter both points out the inadequacies of the standard methodology to the phenomena of remembering and constructively outlines alternatives.