Date: 5 December 2025, Friday
Place: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Time: 12:30
“Nomotheticism as a Questionable Epistemological Commitment (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Crises)“
by
S. Adil Sarıbay, Kadir Has University
Abstract
Psychology as a scientific discipline faces crises from replicability to representativeness. Concurrently, there is a strong bias in psychological science towards nomothetic approaches (i.e., variable-oriented designs in search of generalities). Nomotheticism (i.e., overreliance on nomothetic methods) leads to overlooking the unique psychological structures and processes within individuals, resulting in a theory-method gap. Furthermore, some central assumptions in nomothetic methods, such as ergodicity, are often untenable. Nomotheticism may also be partly responsible for the replicability crisis, a hitherto neglected possibility. While idiographic methods offer a clear alternative, they possess their own limitations. Combining idiographic and nomothetic approaches may represent an optimal integration. Recently developed statistical tools make it feasible to implement such a combination in empirical research. These considerations exemplify how engaging with our crises directly provides valuable opportunities for self-correction and growth..
Bio
S. Adil Sarıbay received his bachelor’s degree (Psychology) from Middle East Technical University in 2000, his master’s degree (Psychological Sciences, Social Psychology track) from Boğaziçi University in 2002, and his Ph.D. (Social/Personality Psychology) from New York University in 2008. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Bremen from 2008 to 2010, and as a visiting faculty member at Charles University in Prague from 2016 to 2017. Between 2010 and 2020, he served as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Boğaziçi University. He received the Science Academy’s Young Scientists Award in 2018. In the Fall of 2020, he joined the Department of Psychology at Kadir Has University, where he currently works. His research focuses particularly on thinking styles and face perception and morphology.
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