Editorial
Authors: T. Stewart
Year: 2016

I have always believed that psychological theory is important, not only to help explain why we behave in certain ways, but also to help us predict future behaviour. One might think that the mark of a good psychological theory was how well it helped us to predict future behaviour. And I think this still remains the ‘gold standard’ by which to judge the value of theories. However, I remember from my days as an enthusiastic psychology student at Glasgow University that it was also possible for theories to have what our lecturer called ‘heuristic value’. I was not sure how this related to what I understood a heuristic to be – something like ‘a rule of thumb’ I think – but when applied to a psychological theory, it meant that the theory had generated wide interest and activity in other researchers as they tried to replicate or rebuff it. I never quite bought into this model and I still think that what we need theories for is to understand and hence predict real behaviour. The problem with theory in human–computer interaction (HCI), and indeed in ergonomics and human factors, is that they do not really stand alone. They draw on psychology, physiology and other core disciplines for their explanations and understanding. Both ergonomics and HCI are also fundamentally practical disciplines, more like engineering than physics. They are both accumulating a significant body of knowledge and data but the theoretical underpinnings are few and far between. Wearing one of my ‘other hats’ as an active standards developer, I am happy to draw on this practical knowledge to flesh out recommendations and requirements in our national and international standards on humansystem interaction. These standards use scientific data but it is always interpreted through international consensus. A scientific experiment may show how human response to a stimulus varies, but the decision about what is an acceptable value, for example, the number of pixel defects that can be regarded as acceptable given today’s technology, is a judgement call. It is only partly based on theory. In some ways, it does not really matter what we call theory in this area (ergonomics, human factors, HCI) except that it does, when we come to research funding. In the UK, university funding for interdisciplinary research tends to suffer at the hands of ‘purer’ disciplines. This is at complete odds with what society needs, as artificial boundaries between disciplines actively stifle useful research. Of course, it is possible to go too far the other way and try to force all research to have an immediately obvious application. Pressure on funding means that researchers have to adopt project management methodologies that leave little scope for discovery and real innovation. A project plan which indicates that the creative breakthrough will take place in quarter 3 would be laughable if it were not for that fact some funding agencies seem to think that this approach is what is needed in today’s business-like world. I would not like to pretend that I have the answer to research funding, but over the three and a half decades that Behaviour & Information Technology (BIT) has been published, I think it is noticeable that there has been as much creativity and genuine research from industry based groups and labs as from academic ones. The pressure on academics to be ‘productive’, that is, generate publications, has also led to fragmentation. In the past, a researcher might wait until a series of experiments was complete before writing it all up in one paper. Now we sometimes see a paper explaining what research is planned, another on initial results, a main results paper and maybe a fourth looking retrospectively at the study. If they were all submitted to BIT, we probably would not publish them all, but I suspect shrewd researchers now spread their papers around to maximise their citation count. We would like to publish more industrially based work, but we also recognise that commercial groups must protect their intellectual property and be very careful when and where they publish. For this reason, I would like to remind potential authors that we are happy to accept manuscripts which have to be less detailed about commercial matters, provided that their manuscripts add value to the field and are worth reading.