The real tragedy of discovering fraud in psychology is realizing that it doesn't matter

Brilliant.

And third, “pick a noun” never tells you to stop. How many leadership studies are required before we understand leadership? 500? 1,000? 1 million? How would we know? There are always more questions we can ask about leadership, more fictions we can correlate it with, more ways we can define it.

So, some fictions are useful. We know the Ford Motor Company is a useful fiction because people use it every day to make cars. Psychological fictions are, so far, mainly useful for producing papers.
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In other sciences, paradigms get overturned when they stop being able to explain the data coming in. If your theory can't account for why Neptune is over there right now, it's going to lose out to a theory that can.

Unfortunately, “humans are biased,” “situations matter,” and “pick a noun,” are unfalsifiable and inexhaustible. Nobody's ever going to prove that, actually, humans obey the laws of optimal decision making all the time. Nobody will show that situations don't matter at all. Nobody is going to demonstrate that leadership, creativity, or “social cryptomnesia” don’t exist. And we're never going to run out of biases, situations, or words. It's horrifying to think, but these proto-paradigms could be immortal.
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But immortal does not mean invulnerable. Another way that paradigms die is people simply lose interest in them, so our best ally against these zombie paradigms is boredom.
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I don't think people are yet close to getting bored of psychosomatic paradigms. Hopefully the biomedical findings that explain the clinical pictures will get there soon and make them redundant.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Brilliant.







I don't think people are yet close to getting bored of psychosomatic paradigms. Hopefully the biomedical findings that explain the clinical pictures will get there soon and make them redundant.
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As long as psychosomatic paradigms aren't sufficiently challenged they'll remain mainstream no matter how many diseases we understand and cure. It's implications not just medical but societal as well. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps works just as well for poor people as it does for us ME patients or other patients for that matter.
 
It's an entertaining article, and I'm sure the author is right that much of what claims to be research in psychology is bunk, not only the outright fraudulent stuff, but the stuff where the researchers treat it seriously, design questionnaires and experiments they think will show something interesting about human behaviour and thoughts, and analyse the data 'correctly' is still completely pointless and useless and makes no difference to humanity.

It's all the usual dross about abstract words like leadership and honesty where researchers try to analyse complex human behaviour and interactions by turning it into statistical data, and failing completely to discover anything useful or interesting.

The author doesn't touch on medical stuff at all, let alone dive into the murky world of psychosomatic medicine where it does actually matter and make a difference to real people's lives.
 
Trish said:
It's an entertaining article, and I'm sure the author is right that much of what claims to be research in psychology is bunk, not only the outright fraudulent stuff, but the stuff where the researchers treat it seriously, design questionnaires and experiments they think will show something interesting about human behaviour and thoughts, and analyse the data 'correctly' is still completely pointless and useless and makes no difference to humanity.

It's all the usual dross about abstract words like leadership and honesty where researchers try to analyse complex human behaviour and interactions by turning it into statistical data, and failing completely to discover anything useful or interesting.

The author doesn't touch on medical stuff at all, let alone dive into the murky world of psychosomatic medicine where it does actually matter and make a difference to real people's lives.
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It's better for it to me. It questions if psychology comes up with anything useful at all. It also questions the worth of psychologic studies whose foundation is built on other fraudulent studies. We know from experience how one twisted narrative can get turned into a money-making machine where study after study gets cranked out. If the studies that are used to form the basic premise get debunked, does that then mean the money-making stops?
 
Jaybee00 said:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1696738283559227608


A stunning, entertaining critique of psychology. Many points apply to anthropology, political science, and sociology. #EconTwitter : many also to economics?
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They sure do. But at the end of the day, currency can be counted as a precise quantity. As can the quantity of goods produced, tax revenue, imports/exports and the numbers of consumers in various areas or grocery stores, along with other basic data points. That makes it a very hard science compared to psychology. And models are not held as sacrosanct, or considered more valid than real life data.

But it sure does apply to economics, just far, far more to psychology.
 
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