Contextualizing Human Psychology

Abstract

The study of psychology has been handicapped by the difficulty of measuring how individual traits affect interactions with the surrounding social structures and how this interaction affects both individual life outcomes and group characteristics. With the advent of continuous, fine-grain data from cell phones, credit cards, and online interactions, the field of human psychology can become better at understanding the role of social context by combining these new data sources with standard experimental methods. This article will examine how these new tools can shed light on the influence individual psychological traits have on life outcomes, as well as on social properties such as inequality. Use of these new data sources requires special care to uphold ethical standards, and so new methodologies have been developed.