Confronting Counsels of Despair for the Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

In recent decades, influential counsels of despair have asserted that the behavioral sciences, including much educational research, have failed to produce long-lasting generalizations. The failure, they say, is due to cultural and historical relativism and interaction effects. But those counsels rest more on logical possibilities than on empirical actualities. They depend on questionable assumptions about the spread and influence of knowledge, they involve contradictions, and they overemphasize the importance of interaction effects. In the last 20 years, moreover, meta-analysis has yielded knowledge concerning the impressive magnitude, consistency, and validity across contexts of many generalizations in the behavioral sciences and promising methods for quantifying and analyzing the generalizability of research results. These arguments, findings, and methods justify mitigating the despair and continuing the effort to build sciences of behavior.