will trade two Methods sections for twenty-two subjects worth of data

The excellent and ever-candid Candid Engineer in Academia has an interesting post discussing the love-hate relationship many scientists who work in wet labs have with benchwork. She compares two very different perspectives:

She [a current student] then went on to say that, despite wanting to go to grad school, she is pretty sure she doesn’t want to continue in academia beyond the Ph.D. because she just loves doing the science so much and she can’t imagine ever not being at the bench.

Being young and into the benchwork, I remember once asking my grad advisor if he missed doing experiments. His response: “Hell no.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. So I wonder if my student will always feel the way she does now- possessing of that unbridled passion for the pipet, that unquenchable thirst for the cell culture hood.

Wet labs are pretty much nonexistent in psychology–I’ve never had to put on gloves or goggles to do anything that I’d consider an “experiment”, and I’ve certainly never run the risk of  spilling dangerous chemicals all over myself–so I have no opinion at all about benchwork. Maybe I’d love it, maybe I’d hate it; I couldn’t tell you. But Candid Engineer’s post did get me thinking about opinions surrounding the psychological equivalent of benchwork–namely, collecting data form human subjects. My sense is that there’s somewhat more consensus among psychologists, in that most of us don’t seem to like data collection very much. But there are plenty of exceptions, and there certainly are strong feelings on both sides.

More generally, I’m perpetually amazed at the wide range of opinions people can hold about the various elements of scientific research, even when the people doing the different-opinion-holding all work in very similar domains. For instance, my favorite aspect of the research I do, hands down, is data analysis. I’d be ecstatic if I could analyze data all day and never have to worry about actually communicating the results to anyone (though I enjoy doing that too). After that, there are activities like writing and software development, which I spend a lot of time doing, and occasionally enjoy, but also frequently find very frustrating. And then, at the other end, there are aspects of research that I find have little redeeming value save for their instrumental value in supporting other, more pleasant, activities–nasty, evil activities like writing IRB proposals and, yes, collecting data.

To me, collecting data is something you do because you’re fundamentally interested in some deep (or maybe not so deep) question about how the mind works, and the only way to get an answer is to actually interrogate people while they do stuff in a controlled environment. It isn’t something I do for fun. Yet I know people who genuinely seem to love collecting data–or, for that matter, writing Methods sections or designing new experiments–even as they loathe perfectly pleasant activities like, say, sitting down to analyze the data they’ve collected, or writing a few lines of code that could save them hours’ worth of manual data entry. On a personal level, I find this almost incomprehensible: how could anyone possibly enjoy collecting data more than actually crunching the numbers and learning new things? But I know these people exist, because I’ve talked to them. And I recognize that, from their perspective, I’m the guy with the strange views. They’re sitting there thinking: what kind of joker actually likes to turn his data inside out several dozen times? What’s wrong with just running a simple t-test and writing up the results as fast as possible, so you can get back to the pleasure of designing and running new experiments?

This of course leads us directly to the care bears fucking tea party moment where I tell you how wonderful it is that we all have these different likes and dislikes. I’m not being sarcastic; it really is great. Ultimately, it works to everyone’s advantage that we enjoy different things, because it means we get to collaborate on projects and take advantage of complementary strengths and interests, instead of all having to fight over who gets to write the same part of the Methods section. It’s good that there are some people who love benchwork and some people who hate it, and it’s good that there are people who’re happy to write software that other people who hate writing software can use. We don’t all have to pretend we understand each other; it’s enough just to nod and smile and say “but of course you can write the Methods for that paper; I really don’t mind. And yes, I guess I can run some additional analyses for you, really, it’s not too much trouble at all.”