Richard Landers Discusses Why Tech Needs Psychological Science Before it Launches

Recently, Richard Landers, faculty, became the new Editor-in-Chief of the American Psychological Association's open-access journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior. In his first editorial as Editor-in-Chief, entitled "Psychology-in-the-Loop," Landers critiqued traditional academic structures and advocated for a structural shift in how psychological science engages with rapidly evolving technology.

According to Landers, the core problem we face in academia is the delayed academic cycle, exacerbated by two things. First, while disciplinary silos can facilitate depth-of expertise, they can also limit any single field’s ability to swiftly tackle complex, real-world problems. Second, Landers believes the field of psychology, in particular, is hampered by its traditional focus on retrospective evaluation, meaning that by the time a psychologist completes and disseminates their research, the technology has already evolved. Also, psychological theory is often applied too late to meaningfully improve how technology shapes society.

To combat this problem, Landers proposed a new proactive concept: –psychology-in-the-loop. Instead of waiting until a technological system is deployed to evaluate its psychological consequences, Landers asserted that psychology should be integrated during the initial design, continuous deployment, and structural execution phases of technology. In order for this model to work, more psychologists and technology designers need to forge early partnerships, directly embedding psychological methodologies and cognitive models into the active loops of automated systems to actively guide, modify, and improve user experiences and safety mechanisms in real time.

For "psychology-in-the-loop" to succeed, Landers argued that higher education must overhaul traditional institutional rubrics. Currently, tenure, review, and promotion systems heavily penalize interdisciplinary work and incentivize slow, isolated publishing. To foster faster, impactful technological collaboration, Landers believes universities must rethink how they measure research quality, openness, and societal responsibility.

Richard Landers, PhD, John P. Campbell Distinguished Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology in the Department of Psychology, and director of the Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment, and Behavior Lab (TNTLAB) at the University of Minnesota