Conclusion

The conclusion firstly draws out some broader theses from the preceding chapters. It then provisionally analyses the deployment of science fiction tropes within the body of official psychological literature, whether at a popular or more scholarly level. Although science fiction may be exploited in a very simple way within psychological theory and practice as a popularizing and didactic tool, there are other, more complex and often self-conscious ways that the genre is used. Psychologists as varied as Sandra and Daryl Bem, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, and Steven Pinker, invoke different speculative narratives of the future as a way to legitimate their particular psychological claims. Perhaps surprisingly, psychology can also make use of science fiction motifs to offer cognitive estrangement of the present, be this consciously, in critical feminist psychology, or unwittingly, as in the famed obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram.