Sundh Joakim, Millroth Philip, Collsiöö August, Juslin Peter
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2025 May;20(3):540-554. doi: 10.1177/17456916241235889. Epub 2025 Mar 4.
In psychological research, noise is often considered a nuisance that obscures rather than contributes information. This simplification overlooks that noise can be informative and that by exploring the nature of the noise one can often draw additional conclusions concerning the underlying psychological processes. It is arguably only in recent years that the mainstream of researchers has taken this idea to heart and demonstrated that it can lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of human behavior. The aim of this special section is to showcase some of the ways in which systematic exploration of noise can be achieved and how it can enrich psychological research. In this introductory article, we introduce the idea of treating noise as endogenous as opposed to exogenous to the theoretical and statistical models of psychological phenomena. We then contribute a historical review of the role of noise in psychological research, including discussions of previous endogenous treatments of noise in the literature. As an illustration, we describe our own research on the precise/not precise model and show how noise distributions can be used to delineate analytic and intuitive modes of reasoning. Finally, we briefly introduce the other contributions to this special section.
在心理学研究中，噪声通常被视为一种干扰因素，它掩盖而非提供信息。这种简化忽略了噪声可能具有信息性，并且通过探索噪声的本质，人们常常可以得出关于潜在心理过程的额外结论。可以说，直到近年来，主流研究人员才真正重视这一观点，并证明它能够在理解人类行为方面带来突破。本专题的目的是展示一些实现对噪声进行系统探索的方法，以及它如何丰富心理学研究。在这篇介绍性文章中，我们提出将噪声视为心理现象理论和统计模型的内生因素而非外生因素的观点。然后，我们对噪声在心理学研究中的作用进行历史回顾，包括对文献中先前关于噪声的内生性处理的讨论。作为例证，我们描述了我们自己关于精确/不精确模型的研究，并展示了噪声分布如何用于描绘分析性和直觉性推理模式。最后，我们简要介绍本专题的其他文章。
