The Flatland Fallacy: Moving Beyond Low Dimensional Thinking

Abstract

Psychology is a complicated science. It has no general axioms or mathematical proofs, is rarely directly observable, and has the privilege of being the only discipline in which the content under investigation (i.e. human psychological phenomena) are the very tools utilized to conduct this investigation. For these reasons, it is easy to be seduced by the idea that our psychological theories, limited by our cognitive capacities, accurately reflect a far more complex landscape. Like the Flatlanders in Edwin Abbot’s famous short story (1884), we may be led to believe that the parsimony offered by our low-dimensional theories reflects the reality of a much higher-dimensional problem. Here we contest that this “Flatland fallacy” leads us to seek out simplified explanations of complex phenomena, limiting our capacity as scientists to build and communicate useful models of human psychology. We suggest that this fallacy can be overcome through (1) the use of quantitative models which force researchers to formalize their theories to overcome this fallacy and (2) improved quantitative training which can build new norms for conducting psychological research.

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