Collin Barnes, Author at The Imaginative Conservative

About Collin Barnes

Collin Barnes is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Hillsdale College, teaching courses in statistics, research design, social psychology, and the history and philosophy of social science. His research in social psychology has addressed questions of interpersonal forgiveness and masculine honor values and has appeared in such journals as Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Political Psychology.

The Liberal Arts & the Limits of Social Psychology

By Collin Barnes|2016-06-17T07:46:25-05:00May 4th, 2016|Categories: Education, Featured, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Plato|

In a recent essay, I argued that the ills facing social psychology today are the product of an obsession with method that elevates the standards of the natural sciences to how inquiries ought to unfold in the human sphere. Here I would like to address a related problem that bears on the prototypical education that [...]

A Conservative Response to the Problems in Social Psychology

By Collin Barnes|2016-03-20T14:29:48-05:00March 10th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Featured|

“In psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion … the existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1949) Social psychology is that sub-discipline of the broader field of psychology [...]