why do (famous) psychologists write books?
In many areas of the social sciences and humanities, authored books are the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. That’s not to say that peer-reviewed journals don’t exist in fields like History and English Literature; they just don’t carry as much weight as books do (bad pun intended). If you want to receive tenure as a professor of History or English lit, you need to write at least one book. (At least, that’s what the few historians and literary folks I know tell me; it’s possible they’re stringing me along.)
On its face, writing a book doesn’t seem to be a high priority in psychology. Very few psychologists can claim to have an authored book on their vita, and these select few individuals still typically list books under a separate heading well below the almighty “Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles” section. I can count on one hand (well, maybe two) the number of times another psychologist has said something to me along the lines of “you should really read so-and-so’s book”. Books don’t play much of a role in day-to-day psychological research, and if anything, many researchers seem to harbor a slight contempt for them. Psychologists typically write books for laypersons, so that research-wise, the level of detail often leaves much to be desired. When psychologists want to know about fancy new experiments, they read fancy new research articles in journals like JEP and Psych Science; when they want to get a bird’s-eye view of a field, they read review articles in journals like Psych Review and Psych Bulletin. Books like Stumbling on Happiness or The Blank Slate may make for great reading before bed, but they’re rarely cited as a primary source in research articles (with a few notable exceptions, e.g., Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error”, which everyone and their grandmother cites).
Now, given academic psychologists’ general apathy toward authored books, you might expect that the authors of popular books on psychology would tend to be writers first and foremost, and that well-known researchers would rarely if ever take time out of their schedule to write a 400-page volume. That would be my intuition, at least; but it turns out to be the wrong one. In fact, a disproportionate number of popsci psychology books are written by very eminent researchers. People like Dan Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will), Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness), Dan Schacter (Searching for Memory), Paul Bloom (Descartes’ Baby), Steven Pinker (a zillion bestselling books on language and/or evolution), Antonio Damasio (several books nominally about old dead white guys but really about emotion), Michael Gazzaniga (The Mind’s Past), and Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain) have all had extremely productive, well-respected research careers independently of their popular output.
The interesting question, of course, is why. Why are popular psychology books more likely to be written by eminent researchers? Broadly speaking, I think there are three classes of explanations (I’m sure I’m leaving many out, though). One possibility is that popular books aren’t actually more likely to be written by famous psychologists; rather, psychologists are more likely to become famous if they’re written popular books. This would be interesting if true inasmuch as it would suggest that the conventional wisdom is wrong: rather than focusing single-mindedly on publishing peer-reviewed journal articles, young academics might do better to divert at least some of their time to popularizing psychology by writing full-length books (then again, most of the aforementioned authors wrote their first book after receiving tenure). Of course, this still wouldn’t explain why psychologists become famous after writing popular books. Perhaps there’s a familiarity effect: psychologists who publish popular books are likely to have their names repeated widely and often, which might subsequently bias researchers to assign more weight to those authors’ empirical research, regardless of its actual merit. Or perhaps hiring committees at schmancy universities use popular fame as an explicit criterion when evaluating candidates (though that seems unlikely, because many of the people listed above–e.g., Wegner, Gilbert, and Schacter, all currently at Harvard–published their major popular works after moving to elite universities).
Another possibility is that there’s a kind of selection effect: lots of psychologists publish (or try to publish) popular books, but only books by famous psychologists are widely read. Other things being equal, one would expect that books by Harvard professors sell more copies than books by professors at third-tier schools, so a bias may emerge at either the publishing stage (famous psychologists are more likely to get book deals) or the consumer stage (people are more likely to buy books that say Harvard or Yale on the cover).
The final possibility, which I personally find most interesting, is that there’s something characterological about good researchers–or at least, a subset of good researchers–that makes them more likely to publish popular works. There are a number of traits that come to mind here. One is simply intelligence: while popular science books are often maligned for their lack of depth, synthesizing a broad research literature into a clear, readable package can be a considerable feat of intellect. Another relevant dimension is creativity and/or the ability to see the big picture. Researchers who are good at integrating diverse ideas maybe both more likely to produce good research and more motivated to paint a discipline with broad strokes in a popular book. Or, it could be a matter of drive: writing a book takes persistence and hard work, and persistent, hard-working people are likely to be more productive in general. Of course, one could also cast this all in a more negative light, as simply a result of egomania: if you’re highly driven to be respected and admired by your academic peers, you might also be driven to show the public at large how cleverly you can write a book.
If I had to put money on it, I’d guess the reason book authors tend to be respected researchers is a little of column B (selection) and a little of column C (character). In theory this is a pretty easily testable hypothesis (the question being, essentially, what factor(s) mediate the relationship between (a) book authorship and (b) research eminence)–in fact, there’s a sizeable literature on the personality of highly successful scientists (e.g., Dean Simonton’s work). In practice, you’d probably be hard-pressed to get Steven Pinker to sit down with you for two hours of psychological testing. Which is fine, because it’s really not that informative a question anyway. The bottom line is just that there’s a interesting discrepancy between what many academic psychologists think about popular psychology books (negatively, or not at all) and what they think about the people who tend to write those books (positively).