Proving the obvious: Four questions for psychologist Seth Pollak

It’s the oldest complaint in the book: Researchers are getting paid to explore the obvious. Diabetes is harmful, but sleep is good for us. We drink more when drinks are cheap. Men are more interested than women in “one-night stands.”

Nice work if you can get it, is one response. But proving — or disproving — the obvious plays a major role in social sciences, according to professor of psychology Seth Pollak, who studies human emotions, child development and child abuse.

Wisconsin Week: So why do researchers occasionally try to prove the obvious?

Pollak: Sometimes a lot of baby steps are necessary to get to the big, juicy issues. Say a child has a reading problem. The first question is, “What should we do about it?” But to solve a complex problem, we need to know some basics: How does a child decode letters or hear sounds? How, across the stages of development, do they combine sights and sounds? If we try to solve a complex issue without the building blocks, we will not get anywhere; there would be too many loose pieces.

Wisconsin Week: What is an example of a big payoff from studying “the obvious”?

Pollak: My research concerns the effects of child abuse, and people often ask why the federal government should spend millions to learn that it’s bad for kids. Duh! My great-grandmother knew that, and if that was all that was happening in my lab, it would be a tremendous waste of resources.

Obviously, child abuse is bad, but we went for many years without asking why early experiences would still be causing trouble long after the child left the family. Why does this experience affect control of behavior or success in school? Why does it affect behaviors related to drug use, crime, marriage and parenting?

We now know that abuse literally changes the brain, and we are beginning to isolate those changes. Knowing the extent of this harm is a motivation to devote more effort to preventing abuse. And knowing the specific nature of the changes — knowing that abused children tend to devote more attention to negative emotional cues in the environment — helps us design intelligent treatments. Unless we understand how these social experiences change the developing brain, we are not in a good position to help. How can we fix something if we don’t know what is broken?

Wisconsin Week: Can research into the “obvious” end up disproving conventional wisdom?

Pollak: Sure. A decade ago, it seemed obvious that the mental health problems of abused children were due to the unhelpful genes they had inherited from abusive parents. But the data now suggest that it’s the experience of how you were treated, more than any genetic predisposition, that matters in child abuse. Though we inherit both genes and environment from our parents, and separating the influences is difficult, this recognition is enormously encouraging. That leads to another very new discovery that was not imaginable even a few years ago: In many cases it might not be a question of what genes each of us was born with, but how our different life experiences can turn on or off different genes that influence our behavior and personalities.

Wisconsin Week: The corollary of “it’s so obvious, it’s not worth studying,” is “it’s so obviously wrong, it’s not worth studying.” Your reaction?

Pollak: Science is a polemic. Every time we crawl a little higher in our understanding, some new things come into focus and our perspective changes. Thirteen years ago, reviewers of my first grant to the National Institutes of Health disputed the wisdom of studying brain activity to shed light on young children’s emotions. Today, you can’t imagine studying behavioral problems without looking at the brain. That change has happened quickly, and it’s due in no small measure to work here at UW–Madison.

The lay public and scientists are coming to understand that emotion is a biological function. It’s hard to imagine human life without emotions, and it’s hard to imagine social or emotional behavior not being intimately tied to the human brain. This was not obvious 20 years ago.