Morgan Worthy
For a long time, I have been interested in creative problem-solving as it relates to doing research. For me it is all about recognizing and solving puzzles. [In 1975, I published a book, Aha: A Puzzle Approach to Creative Thinking (Nelson-Hall, Chicago).] The following account may be a bit disjointed, but I want to share some history on the thinking process that seems to work for me.
One day (6/27/06), I hurriedly scanned the New York Times, hardly stopping at all, because I wanted to get on to other things. Then on page D3 I suddenly stopped flipping through the pages. What had caught my eye (first unconsciously?) was part of a headline which read “...the Holy Grail: A Red Iris.” At some level, I must have thought I had found something to add to my cognitive folder on all the strange red-eyed animals such as birds that are noted skulkers or eaters of normally toxic foods (e.g. bees) or perhaps something new akin to the strange, red-eyed, egg-eating, Scarlet Snake. But no, I had to laugh at how sensitive I was to thinking I was about to learn something new about some animal’s “iris color”; it proved to be an article on flowers.
Even though you do need to always verify consciously (which can take a few seconds or many years), learning to give attention to vague, almost unconscious, prompts that cause you to pause, sometimes pay off. I think the first time I became aware of this and started trying to develop it as a knack happened during a freshman biology class in college. The final exam consisted of a very long list of multiple-choice questions. As was my custom, I answered those items I was confident about and left blank, for later, those questions on which I would have to guess. As I got near the end of the exam, I had a vague feeling of recognition, but I did not know at first what it was I recognized. Ordinarily, one pays no attention to the sequence of letters (or numbers) that comprise the answers to multiple-choice questions, but at some level something looked familiar, strange or non-random; vaguely, I was aware of a pattern. Looking back, I saw that the professor, for ease of scoring, had repeated for the second half of the exam, the same scoring key he had used for the first half of the exam. All I had to do to answer the remaining items correctly was to use for each item, the same letter I had used for its twin in the other half of the test. (Yes, I did tell him how I managed to get a perfect score.) From that episode and some others along the way, I learned that a vaguely recognized pattern often proves to be a good starting point to learn something new. My experience has been that the best research hypotheses originate by that process.
In the military, I was fortunate enough to be trained as a communications analyst to work in an intelligence outfit. For several years I spent all my work time every day trying to see patterns, connections, remote associations within large amounts of data. I had no way to control the amount or quality of the data but had to work with what was available.
Looking back, I realize that was the same situation I later chose for myself, as a research psychologist, when I decided to abandon laboratory research and to concentrate on doing archival research. The decision (about 1970) was made when I read a little paperback book, “Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences” by some researchers at Northwestern University, Eugene J. Webb, Donald T. Campbell, Richard D. Schwartz and Lee Secrest. They called for more people who were interested in behavior to analyze the vast amounts of archival data available. Such data are sometimes of uncertain quality, but have the advantage of low cost and are not as subject to experimenter bias (only in the sense that the data have already been gathered for some other purpose). The problem of using data for which there is little quality control is overcome by doing multiple low-level studies from which one can triangulate. I think their emphasis on “triangulation” is probably what caught my eye; the same term is used a lot in military intelligence.
As I read that book, I thought,“Aha, they are talking to me.” I volunteered, as it were, and have never looked back. My first efforts to use archival data involved looking at athletic performance in humans. The hypothesis that dark eyes (independent of race) are associated with quick reactions grew out of those early studies and was first published in 1974. The idea was greeted with wide interest in the popular press (e. g. Newsweek heard of my eye color research and had an article on it in their “Science” section of the November 19, 1973 issue). Later, a series of laboratory studies done at Penn State University [see Hale et al. (1980) in the annotated bibliography] confirmed the hypothesis as it related to humans. The process had involved a vague hypothesis followed first by inexpensive archival studies which were then followed by expensive, well-controlled, and independent, laboratory studies. That, to me, is a reasonable sequence.
Even though those early efforts to do archival studies of human behavior proved promising, the complications and controversies involved in trying to interpret human differences led me to look for some alternative approach to studying eye color and behavior. One day it dawned on me (what perhaps should have been obvious) to look at eye color differences between species. With animals, one can compare many species, taxonomic families, etc. The differences in behavior are larger in absolute terms, and possible cultural influences are not a concern.
[The changes in focus from laboratory research to archival research and then from humans to animals coincided with my leaving college teaching as my primary role (1966-1970) to work in the college counseling center. As a teaching professor, I had published in peer-reviewed journals. One of my articles, a laboratory study of self-disclosure, was selected as a “Citation Classic”. No longer needing to “publish or perish”, I approached the question of eye color and behavior as a hobby or puzzle that I could study, alone, mostly on my own time. I have since offered observations as tentative hypotheses or done low-cost, archival, studies that invite independent confirmation. Throughout this, now, 38 years, I have tried to see the big picture. Whereas one valuable approach to doing animal research is to set one’s focus an inch wide and a mile deep ( e.g. intensive study of one species), I have tried to make my focus an inch deep (one external trait, eye color) and a mile wide ( all land vertebrates: amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals)].
One of the first things I noticed was how similar cats and herons are though they come from different classes of animals. Most species in both families have yellow eyes and both families hunt by means of ambush or stalking. Among other predators, as well, there seemed to be a relationship between light eyes and ambush or delayed attack. Likewise, dark-eyed predators seemed to be characterized by the use of speed and immediate, quick, reactions in their hunting behavior (e.g. dark-eyed birds and bats that catch insects in-the-open and on-the-wing). I recognized that these differences were probably part of a large underlying pattern linking eye color and behavior of animals in general. There is a long history in behavior genetics of using eye color mutations as marker variables for behavioral differences at the subspecies level of analysis. My idea was to look at different levels of analysis and across different taxonomic orders and classes for any consistency in the underlying pattern.
For many years I have gathered archival information in an effort to better understand that pattern. The biggest job has been to bring together in one database scattered information on published species eye colors. Now, with eye colors for more than 5,000 species, the underlying pattern can be seen a little more clearly. It is a big jigsaw puzzle and I have had the pleasure of tentatively fitting together some of the pieces. With each tentative fit I have enjoyed another “Aha.”
Slowly, as independent research confirms, rejects, corrects, expands, or clarifies tentative conclusions, the outlines of the underlying pattern will become clearer. That is all part of the triangulation process. My hope, of course, is that some of my initial observations about iris pigmentation and behavior in animals will be as conclusively confirmed as was my observation about dark eyes and quick reactions in humans.
Sep 19, 2008
My Approach to Research
IRISPIGMENTATION.COM
