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Le on Peterson, 'The Unbuilt Bench: Experimental Psychology on the Verge of Science' [Review]
Peterson, David. The Unbuilt Bench: Experimental Psychology on the Verge of Science. : Columbia University Press, 2025. xi + 313 pp. $34.99 (e-book), ISBN 9780231561679.$35.00 (paper), ISBN 9780231217323.
Reviewed by
Vi Le (Harvard University)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (September, 2025)
Commissioned by
Kathryn D. Lankford (Arizona State University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61957
David Peterson’s The Unbuilt Bench enters a growing body of scholarship concerned with the conditions under which the human sciences claim credibility, particularly amid ongoing debates over replication, methodological reform, and the political valences of expertise. The Unbuilt Bench thus contributes meaningfully to current conversations in science and technology studies, historical epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge. These lines of inquiry, across their various disciplinary articulations, have become increasingly attuned to how scientific disciplines secure authority through infrastructural display, normative rhetoric, and the stabilization of uncertainty. Peterson’s account offers a template for investigating not only how knowledge is made but also how its credibility is maintained amid methodological fragility. The Unbuilt Bench explores psychology as a field suspended between aspiration and constraint: a discipline that draws institutional legitimacy from the aura of science but lacks the infrastructural capacities that sustain cumulative experimental systems. As Peterson writes, “the promise of experimental psychology is fueled by the dream that human thought and behavior can be predicted and controlled to the degree they can yield behavioral technologies” (p. viii). Yet that promise remains largely rhetorical, he argues, for psychology is “characterized by deficits in the embodied skills and technologies that drive bench-building in other fields” and thus lacks the material infrastructure required for cumulative experimental traction (p. 19). With ethnographic sensitivity, Peterson traces how psychology’s epistemic ambitions persist despite infrastructural deficiency, theoretical fragmentation, and the enduring allure of methodological rigor.
At the heart of the book is a deceptively simple question: What kind of science is psychology? Rather than offering a diagnostic critique or a reformist blueprint, Peterson stages this question as a sustained inquiry across eight chapters. Each investigates a different region of experimental psychology: molecular biology as comparative counterpoint, developmental and social psychology as central case studies, and open science reformers as a contemporary coda. What binds these domains is a shared tension between the methodological ideals that define psychological science and the absence of what Peterson calls “bench-building”: the incremental development of tools, techniques, and embodied skills that extend experimental capacity.
Peterson opens with the argument that psychology’s authority rests not on technological achievement or predictive success but on the enduring promise that experimental methods drawn from the natural sciences will eventually yield similar epistemic dividends. It is a discipline unified not by theory or object but by a commitment to the experiment as a site of purification, control, and statistical inference. Against this promissory structure, Peterson contrasts the absence of “bench-building”—recursive practices that, in disciplines such as molecular biology, enable researchers to incrementally transform the natural world into objects amenable to controlled experimentation. Drawing on John Dewey’s pragmatist epistemology and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s theory of experimental systems, Peterson theorizes bench-building not merely as technical activity but also as a condition of epistemic possibility. The bench, in this account, is a stage for method and a generative interface where experimental engagement gives rise to both epistemic objects and conceptual transformation. Peterson’s reframing of scientific progress through the material labor of bench-building is a theoretically generative move. It avoids binaries and instead focuses on the infrastructure of experimental control and perception. This echoes and extends traditions in science and technology studies (STS), especially the practice turn and material semiotics.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer a compelling juxtaposition between molecular biology and experimental psychology. Here, bench-building is a matter not of heroic innovation but of slow, mundane refinement: adjusting suction pressure, tweaking light pathways, iterating on rig design. Peterson renders the cybernetic interplay of hand, eye, and machine with ethnographic sensitivity, arguing that scientific capacity accrues not only through theory but also through the mutual refinement of technology and perception. Psychology, on the other hand, has few tools whose refinement deepens experimental traction. Instead, it invests in standardization of protocol and rhetorical fidelity to method. This contrast provides both the empirical and symbolic scaffolding for Peterson’s argument: The laboratory bench, in psychology, remains more metaphor than infrastructural reality.
In the labs of developmental psychology, researchers work with infants—subjects constructed as pre-social and thus epistemically pure yet experimentally intractable. The infant is both ideal and impossible: “Unsocialized and uncultured,” they do not participate willingly and cannot ethically be compelled to do so (p. 128). Without the capacity for bench-building, researchers turn to strategies of interpretive improvisation. The result is a science of experimental necessity rather than precision, a field that must approximate normal science through rhetorical coherence more than material control.
This dynamic of methodological improvisation reaches its most intricate and revealing form in chapter 6’s account of social psychology. Peterson portrays a domain organized not by theoretical convergence or technological development but by the strategic management of conceptual ambiguity. Constructs like “validation,” “responsiveness,” or “humor” are operationalized as needed, often shaped more by reviewer expectations than by empirical necessity. In the absence of bench-building, researchers invest their energy in narrative construction: crafting findings that are interesting, counterintuitive, and rhetorically legible. Peterson refrains from moralizing, but he is not uncritical. He suggests that in a field driven by novelty and fluency, the capacity for cumulative progress becomes increasingly fragile.
Chapter 7 turns to the open science reform movement, where Peterson’s tone shifts toward cautious realism. Reformers seek to restore psychology’s credibility through the embrace of Mertonian norms—communalism, disinterestedness, skepticism—recast as methodological self-policing. Though attentive to the movement’s sincerity, Peterson remains skeptical of its structural reach. The reforms are cultural rather than infrastructural: They do not provide new tools or experimental paradigms but instead offer a new rhetorical standard for what counts as trustworthy. Transparency emerges as the new proxy for truth. “They are not making the swamp any less swampy,” Peterson observes, “they are getting a better, more accurate survey of the swamp” (pp. 221–22). The metaphor is apt. What is gained is vigilance, not traction.
The final chapter considers not merely the absence of bench-building in psychology but also the ethical and epistemological consequences that might accompany its eventual realization. If psychology were to develop the kind of recursive experimental infrastructure characteristic of the natural sciences, complete with manipulable protocols and predictive technologies, it would acquire new forms of control but might also risk diminishing the interpretive openness that defines its subject. Peterson cautions that the very qualities that render psychological subjects meaningful could be subordinated to a regime of instrumental predictability. In such a vision, the aspiration to infrastructure becomes entangled with the desire to render the human fully knowable and manipulable, a move that could ultimately foreclose the normative complexity psychology purports to illuminate. Bench-building, in this speculative light, may yield both epistemic gain and a transformation in the ontology of the human itself.
It is here that Peterson’s intervention becomes most consequential. His argument is not that psychology should emulate the natural sciences but that it must reckon with the costs of doing so. The bench, for all its epistemic power, withdraws the object of study from the lifeworld. To ask psychology to build a bench is to ask it to relinquish the irreducibility of the human subject, whose unpredictability may be less a flaw than a moral safeguard.
That said, the book’s central analytic concept of bench-building remains under-theorized in certain respects. While Peterson is persuasive in outlining its absence in psychology, he is less precise in articulating its thresholds. When does iterative stabilization become bench-building proper? What distinguishes infrastructural improvisation from full-fledged experimental systems? The comparative frame with molecular biology risks reifying a single model of technoscientific maturity.
This limitation becomes more pronounced in light of the omission of cognitive psychology from the book’s analysis. Among psychology’s subfields, cognitive psychology stands out as a plausible candidate for partial bench-building, given its reliance on replicable, instrumentally controlled paradigms and its history of cumulative task development. Cognitive psychology, with its portable and replicable experimental platforms, exemplifies a form of recursive design that approximates bench-building. Although less materially dense than the infrastructures of molecular biology, its experimental systems suggest a different modality of stabilization. Peterson gives limited attention to how intradisciplinary variation might be situated within his framework.
For historians and sociologists of science, Peterson’s book offers a deeply informed and richly documented case study of experimental psychology’s infrastructural impasse. For psychologists themselves, it is a mirror—sometimes sympathetic, sometimes disquieting. Above all, The Unbuilt Bench is a study in epistemic humility: a recognition that progress in the human sciences may require not better instruments but a more capacious understanding of what knowledge is and how it is generated.
Citation:
Vi Le.
Review of
Peterson, David.
The Unbuilt Bench: Experimental Psychology on the Verge of Science.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2025.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61957
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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