For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time.

Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the replication crisis occurred (from the perspective of the psychology of those who precipitated and enabled it).

Sociologists may also apply ethnographic methods to examine the institutions, practices, and self-concepts of sociologists.

After all, what could be more available to study and more at the top of your mind than your own group? And why not apply your field’s methods to your group since you are already applying them to everything else?

But in my experience, this kind of “Wesearch” – if you’ll allow me to coin a term – is quite rare and niche.

If I’m right about this, why would that be? I suspect part of the reason is that people want to see themselves as not being merely governed by simple forces.

It’s all fine and good to model other anonymous people as merely responding to incentives, being impacted by severe confirmation bias, mimicking each other’s behavior for social status, etc. But we don’t want to think of ourselves, and the colleagues we respect in that way. It feels reductionist (and inaccurate) to do so. Our colleagues might even feel insulted to be modeled in such a way. These are models only for everyone else.

An interesting exception, pointed out by a reader, is that academic psychologists often have run studies on graduate students (e.g., their mental health and other psychological challenges they face). But even still, that’s only an example of it studying one aspect of itself.

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 26, 2025.

Much of what happens in our brains is chemical, why would depression not be? If by “imbalance” we happen to mean “a state of brain chemicals that the patient doesn’t want”, as opposed to, say, some specific theory that is now discredited like “not enough serotonin” (i.e., the low serotonin myth), then depression can reasonably be thought of as a “chemical imbalance”.

Disagreement about whether depression is a chemical imbalance may stem from confusion about what it means for something to be a “model” for something else. For instance, “chemical imbalance” is a model for depression. But it’s just one model, and it is often not the most useful one. Here are all the models I’ve seen people use for depression:

(1) Neurology – caused by a chemical imbalance of neurotransmitters in your brain; that’s why anti-depressants are effective for many people.

(2) Beliefs – caused by unhelpful perceptions of yourself, your future, or the world; that’s why cognitive therapy is helpful for many people.

(3) Circadian rhythm/sleep – that’s why some people may find chronotherapy (involving sleep and light) or sleep apnea treatment effective.

(4) Relationships – that’s why socially isolated people often feel depressed and why Interpersonal Therapy may be effective.

(5) Nutrition – that’s why people with depression are sometimes found to have vitamin deficiencies or harmful diets and may feel better if these are corrected.

(6) Society – that’s why groups of people who are oppressed, shunned, or in poverty are more likely to be depressed, and improving these social problems may resolve the depression.

(7) Behavior – that’s why depressed people are sometimes found stuck in harmful behavioral feedback loops and why Behavioral Activation for depression is helpful.

(8) Trauma – that’s why people who were unloved or abused as children may be more likely to be depressed, and why people often show depressive symptoms for a while after a loved one dies.

(9) Meaning – that’s why depressed people sometimes feel that nothing matters, and why techniques from the ACT approach that get you to take action towards what you value may be useful.

(10) Genetics, that’s partly why depression tends to run in families and helps explain why one person gets depressed in a particular circumstance that another person doesn’t get depressed in.

These can’t all be true, can they? I believe they can, in the sense that each of these is partially correct, or to be more precise, each of these is a model for depression that is better than useless. What’s nice about this set of models is that they are complementary: they each capture some distinct aspect of depression, and each will be especially useful in certain circumstances. In particular, a number of these refer to different things that can cause or trigger depression. Not all of these causes will be in play in any particular case, so sometimes one model will apply more than other.

There are many ways to model any system. A good model typically is not one that fully explains every detail of a system but rather one that explains important aspects of the system in important cases of interest. It is not a contradiction to find that there are multiple good models for the same system that are very different from each other. They may each capture different important attributes of the system, or may each be accurate in different situations, or they may just represent similar information in very different seeming ways. Even if one model is much better than the others on average, there may be specific cases where the alternative models make better predictions. And realizing that may allow us to combine models to create an even better one.

Consider the game of Pac-Man as an example. One way to model the game is to think of the ghosts as sentient beings that are trying to touch you, which will cause you to die. This is the intuitive model that players often have of the game, and despite being completely untrue on one level (the ghosts are not sentient), it is quite a useful model that enables you to play the game effectively.

However, if you train a reinforcement learning algorithm to play Pac-Man, it will produce a very different model of the system (one that may well contain no direct notion of ghosts that are out to get you, and likely the model it produces will be one that you’ll have a hard time understanding). Yet, using this model, the software may play Pac-Man as well as you do or perhaps even better. So whose model is right, the intuitive human one or that of the reinforcement learning algorithm? Neither is “right”, and neither is “wrong”; they both capture important elements of the game in different ways.

A more complete model of Pac-Man than either the intuitive human one from a reinforcement learning algorithm’s is the computer code of Pac-Man, which determines the gameplay. From the point of view of you playing the game effectively, it MIGHT help to some extent to study the code in advance to learn potential quirks of the ghosts’ behavior, but mostly the code would not be useful while you play, and you’ll find it a lot easier to think of ghosts being out to get than to mentally reference the underlying algorithms. So your “ghosts are out to get me” model may be more helpful to you than the “source code of the game” model, despite the latter being a much more accurate description.
But even the source code is not the ultimate model of your Pac-Man experience, as the ULTIMATE model would include the hardware that code runs on (maybe the behavior of that code varies slightly on different hardware), and even the people around who might distract you during the game, and ultimately the laws of physics on which the behavior of the hardware and everything else depends.

As statistician George Box once wrote, “The most that can be expected from any model is that it can supply a useful approximation to reality: All models are wrong; some models are useful.”

So let’s stop asking if depression “is” a chemical imbalance. Instead, let’s ask: is it useful to sometimes model depression as a chemical imbalance? I think the answer there is yes; this is one model that should be used among other models in certain specific instances. It may sometimes be a useful model, but other times other models of depression will be much more useful. And, of course, much of what happens in our brains can be modeled as chemical changes. So the question is: when is this a useful way to think about what’s happening chemically in the brain? When does such a model give us insight?

If a depressed person responds well to anti-depressants, we can use our Neurology model of depression to try to understand this (though that still may be very tricky to do). On the other hand, if a person’s depression lifts after they stop believing that they are inherently worthless, we can use our Beliefs model to try to understand this. And if a person’s depression improves when they adjust their sleep patterns, we can use our Circadian rhythm model to try to explain this. And so on.

Ideally, we’d try to figure out the most effective model for a given person’s depression so that we can accurately model their specific depression, not merely depression in general.

Here are 24 different methods you could use to better understand the way humans work. In each case, I use “trying to figure out new things about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” as an example. What techniques am I leaving out here?

1. Papers: Reading academic studies (e.g., from social psychology, consumer psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, etc.)

Example: reading the newest academic papers on treatments for PTSD.

2. Products: Carefully examining products and apps that have been successful (as well as, potentially, those that have failed) to understand what human needs they were or weren’t satisfying and why they succeeded or failed.

Example: looking at what mental health apps related to PTSD are popular in the app stores.

3. Outliers: Investigating extreme case studies of real-life events (e.g., case studies of people with extreme psychological conditions who may have been reported about in the news or true stories about what actually happened when people were placed into really extreme conditions).

Example: reading about cases of extreme cults and whether or not each cult produced PTSD-like symptoms in its members.

4. Society: Examining the large-scale trends and organization of societies, including potentially human cultures around the world (American culture, traditional cultures, etc.) and how they are similar or different, and which societal structures tend to be created and what the effects of these structures are, etc.

Example: investigating which sort of societies PTSD appears to be much more prevalent in.

5. Conversations: Talking to smart and insightful people about what they think is true of human psychology. You can also show them the models or theories you have so far to get their criticism and suggestions for improving them.

Example: asking really smart (non-experts) who had PTSD what their current theories about PTSD are.

6. Reading: Reading books, blog posts, media articles, etc., containing information from smart or insightful people about psychology (including potentially writing from life coaches, relationship experts, marketers, thoughtful bloggers, user experience designers, game makers, etc.)

Example: seeing what theories bloggers have proposed regarding PTSD that many academics may not have considered.

7. Experts: Reaching out to experts and talking to them to understand their models of psychology (e.g., psychologists, psychiatrists, game developers, etc.). You can also show them the models and theories you have so far to get their criticism and suggestions for improving them.

Example: talking to world-class experts in PTSD.

8. Textbooks: Reading academic textbooks about psychology, cognitive science, etc.

Example: Linehan’s textbook on DBT and thinking about possible applications of DBT in PTSD treatment.

9. Models: Looking at what models or frameworks of psychology others have created (e.g., in social psychology, theoretical cognitive neuroscience, gamification research, persuasion research, etc).

Example: looking at the model of PTSD that is used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy treatment.

10. Intuition: Our own intuition for what’s true about humans (presumably based on our first-hand experience interacting with others, as well as our first-hand, ingrained experience of just being a human).

Example: We may have the intuition that after experiencing a traumatic event, people will tend to start having frequent disruptive thoughts about that event, even when doing unrelated things.

11. Interviews: talking to individuals or groups about their thought processes, feelings, behaviors, etc., to understand their individual psychology and then attempting to extrapolate that knowledge to humans more generally.

Example: interviewing 20 people with PTSD about what their experience of it is like and what does or does not seem to help them.

12. Application: attempting to put into practice a psychological theory (e.g., by coaching individuals using a psychological technique or by trying to build an app that implements it) and paying attention to the ways it seems to work or not work.

Example: creating a tool for people with PTSD and making it publicly available, then monitoring how people respond to it.

13. Anecdotes: psychologically surprising or interesting anecdotes that we’re confident actually happened (e.g., because they happened to us or were reported on by a trustworthy source) that may have a bearing on human psychology.

Example: a story a friend told you about how they (believe) they fully cured their own extreme PTSD in a matter of days.

14. Self-observation: careful (and honest) observation of our own thoughts/beliefs/behavior/emotions and internal processes.

Example: observing the mental processes in your own mind that seem to occur after a very upsetting event has happened.

15. Self-experimentation: simply trying techniques and paying close attention to what effects they appear to have and what it feels like to apply them.

Example: try the technique of writing down for a week every upsetting thought that you notice yourself having, as well as writing down everything you observe or learn about the experience of doing this.

16. Deduction: combining propositions we already believe to produce new propositions we didn’t realize before that may be true.

Example: knowing that women with PTSD are much more likely to have associated depression than men with PTSD, and knowing that depression is a strong risk factor for attempting suicide, we might predict that women with PTSD are more likely to attempt suicide than men with PTSD (even though they may not be more likely than men to actually commit suicide).

17. Experiments: Conduct your own online randomized controlled trials, surveys, longitudinal studies, or fMRI studies, etc.

Example: looking at which variables that don’t seem obviously PTSD related are, in fact, strong predictors of whether someone has PTSD.

18. Statistics: looking up known statistics about a phenomenon.

Example: looking up whether younger people or older people are known to be more likely to get PTSD in any given 12-month period.

19. Data: finding existing data sets (e.g., large longitudinal surveys or government data sets) and running your own statistical analyses to test hypotheses.

Example: measuring whether it is true that after someone gets a pet, they are more likely to recover from PTSD than similar people who do not get a pet. Running studies can also be a good way to search for new hypotheses. For instance, examining which of many variables in the data are most associated with a rapid recovery from PTSD.

20. Literature: looking at portrayals of psychology in literature, art, myths, stories, philosophical writings, etc.

Example: What hypotheses do Kafka’s novels give us about the nature of trauma?

21. Crowdsourcing: Request suggestions for hypotheses on a social media platform like Facebook or X or on a question-answer site like Quora.

Example: posting to Facebook asking people to suggest theories for why PTSD sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t happen after extreme trauma.

22. Social experiments: bringing a group of people together under a new set of chosen social rules or guidelines and observing what happens.

Example: getting a small group of people together with the idea that it will be a time to discuss traumas that members of the group have experienced.

23. Evolution: considering what possible evolutionary function different psychological phenomena might have.

Example: consider ways that aspects of PTSD responses might be evolutionarily adaptive.

24. Practitioners: examine how people “in the field” who benefit from being able to understand this aspect of psychology do their work.

For example, at veterans hospitals where rates of PTSD are high, investigate what techniques and approaches the therapists have developed to work successfully with their patients.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 22, 2025.