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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the true experiment:

In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, Richard Griggs and Jared Bartels each found that nearly every introductory psychology textbook on the market included Zimbardo’s narrative of the experiment, most uncritically. Curious about why the field’s appointed gatekeepers, presumably well-informed about the experiment’s dubious history, would choose to include it nonetheless, I reached out. Three told me they had originally omitted the Stanford prison experiment from their first editions because of concerns about its scientific legitimacy. But even psychology professors are not immune to the forces of social influence: two added it back in under pressure from reviewers and teachers, a third because it was so much in the news after Abu Ghraib.

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In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense.

This seems to go up and down the field... From academic publishing (replicability crisis) to undergraduate teaching. Psychology just doesn't have a scientific perspective on truth and knowledge.

Instead of a need (Abu graib and timely relevance) for knowledge triggering research and the accumulation of knowledge, it triggers the field to accept bogus knowledge because they need something.

I found when I was studying Psychology, that it's very much focused on pragmatics rather than intellectual rigor. i.e. if an explanation helps provide an effective therapeutic model then it's considered "good enough".

I'm not saying it's right. In fact in terms of evaluating the field "as a science" it's wrong. I guess that's why it's a BA not a BSc ... probably also why various other more rigorous subfields such as neuroscience have split off to become their own disciplines.

I think most people who have studied psychology will get this, and critically evaluating all the bullshit around you should be one of the fundamental skills that you learn. Unfortunately though, things are taken far more literally once they get "out into the open".

Agreed. Approaching psychology with a permanent kind of rigour simply doesn't work. In order to change the mind that is not functioning in the way one desires, one has to believe that mind can change. Presenting information as though it's impermeable, absolute, matter of fact truth since the event(?) that allowed humans to first begin to think is absolutely absurd. If humans can go through all the different variations of thought they have gone through thus far, why do we work with the assumption that there's any absolute truth to the nature of thought to begin with?

Therapeutic models have to be adaptive to the individual one is guiding towards mental wellness (or whatever the goal is). Someone undergoing the process of regaining trust in their own mind has to pass some of their own personally designed tests. Otherwise they are just consuming information that already exists, and that's back to the original problem - one can only trust in information that comes from others, and not from the individual self (unless it matches perfectly with others). That's paradoxical, and if all oneself can do is reproduce what already exists, one can not prove to oneself that one is different or has changed or has improved, from 'before therapy'. So psychology is going to keep changing. It has to.

That's what students of psychology are interested in, right? Why force the model they learned that at one point, made absolute sense, to the student, at a prior time, onto others? What is the purpose of that?

I think that stuff is obvious when it's out in the open, but every student, researcher, and doctor of psychology has their own fears and 'issues' to deal with. What if I get it wrong? What if I screw it up really badly for someone else? Didn't I go into this to help people? And I think those kinds of fears, if they are not dealt with in a responsible, respectful manner - can really control the dynamic far more than all the knowledge one has access to, and all the thought and reason one can muster.

> In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense.

The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and testing. It's mostly based on consensus driven by a handful of powerful practitioners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science

What sigmund freud did wasn't science. His oedipal complex theory isn't a scientific theory. There is no scientific test to refute it. You just accept it or not.

The biggest problem of our generation is the conflation of science ( hard science ) with pseudoscience ( soft science ). Because both has the word science in it, people give soft sciences far more credit than it deserves.

If anyone is interested, Richard Feynman had a very interesting interview about it.

https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo

psychiatry != psychology. Do not over generalize. Psychiatry has many problems, namely overprescribing pharmaceuticals, but is it not the same thing as "social science", it is an actual branch of medicine, and a psychiatrist has to complete medical school,psychiatric specialization, and residency.

Erm.... Idk. What was Freud then? These are certainly separate fields in terms of accreditation, but in terms of academia, they're really subdisciplines.

Sigmund Freud was a 19th century doctor. The modern medical field is not comparable to the one 150 years ago when the treatment of most things was "go breathe near the ocean for a bit".

tbh, going to take a nice couple of breaths next to the ocean sounds like it would do me a lot of good at the moment.

For relaxation absolutely - for polio, not as great.

Also, no serious 21st century psychologist or psychiatrist would consider Freud's theories to have any validity other than for interpreting Shakespeare plays. Freud's psychodynamic psychology has been long eclipsed by behavioral, cognitive, and evolutionary subfields that have much stronger experimental standards than Freud had (most of his hypotheses came from case sudies of a handful of his patients).

Um I have a family friend who is a practicing psychoanalyst. They are still eligible for license in all States and remain a popular form of psychotherapy. So don't be so sure the field has moved past Freud. They still think his theories are valid enough to use on people.

According to Wikipedia, it has evolved since Freud, so it may not be valid to say it hasn't moved past Freud. On the other hand, I'm sure homeopathy has changed in that time as well.

Former psych major here. At my undergrad, the psychiatry and psychotherapy tracks were actually in separate departments (neuroscience and psychology respectively). There was actually a world of difference between the two, and it's one of my post-graduation regrets that I didn't choose the more rigorous / intellectually satisfying department for my major.

At least in the US...

A psychiatrist is a physician. They go to the same schools as future radiologists, surgeons, and general practitioners. They learn gross anatomy by dissecting cadavers. They work 80 hour weeks learning to perform medical procedures on actual patients. After that, as doctors, they receive specialized clinical training in years-long residency programs. They are licensed by state medical boards in addition to their own professional orgs.

A psychiatrist is authorized to hand you a prescription for antibiotics, for amphetamines, for opioids. Christ, a psychiatrist is authorized to detain you on their credibility alone for upwards of 48 hours, arguably exceeding the legal detention power of the police.

Psychologists are certainly competent, well-educated experts in their discipline, but they don’t and can’t do all that. Of course the two deal with loosely related subjects, but there is very little comparison between them in any practical sense.

Criticisms of Marx & Freud's "social science" is basically the modern standard definition for science. I agree, as a criticism.

But... It is simply not true that psychology practices academia as a non scientific discipline. The expirement. Publish data. Etc. It is just substandard data.

Freud Oedipal complex theory may just be nonsciece but this Stanford prison "theory" is scientific, it's just scientific fraud.

Psychiatry and psychology rejected Freud as an unscientific laughingstock a long, long time ago. This shouldn't be trotted out as a an example of how these fields operate today.

They do attempt the scientific method, they just aren't doing a very good job of it much of the time apparently. If you think Freud, psychiatry and psychology are so synonymous that they can be referred to interchangeably, try picking up a current psychology textbook.

> "Psychiatry and psychology rejected Freud as an unscientific laughingstock a long, long time ago."

In my experience few laugh at him. Most respect him, even if they don't believe him.

laughingstock was a not a perfect choice of words. People will still loosely refer to his more well known ideas casually. Some could be said to respect him to some degree, others not. But hardly anyone is confused about exactly how scientific his output was, and neither would any textbook published in the last 40 years.

The 'scientific method' is mostly a pop-culture myth. Mostly used to discrediting whatever views one does not like. There is value in predictability, but one must understand its limits. It's one thing to work with electrons and planetary systems. It's easy to be cocky about how successful physics is. But that is far from covering the whole of reality. Our minds, whether you believe that means your brain or soul or both, are much more complex than the hydrogen atom.

It's one thing to appreciate what Richard Feynman contributed to physics, an another to understand his behaviour in striptease clubs. It's one thing to explain black holes and stuff, and another to analyze the correlation between IQ and success, BIG FIVE personality traits, disgust, political views and biases and what not.

That our brains are more complex that hydrogen atom is a fact, but that does not invalidate scientific method. It simply means that we need much more time, more research, more data and more complex theories to understand brain than we need for an atom.

Psychology today reminds me the state of medicine before bacteria were discovered: we do some semi-magical rituals that sometimes work, but they do not produce predictable results, because we are yet to discover the real underlying mechanisms of human mind.

I think if you dig in to many modern medical treatments, you'll find that the true reason they work is unknown (and in many cases, there is little evidence that they work at all).

Even in the hard science of physics, we we can understand the cause and effect, but the fundamentals of nuclear forces, gravity, magnetism are all a complete mystery.

But there's certainly hope that someday we'll be able to explain through physics how come we hope to explain hope and understanding through physics.

Imho, the conflation of pseudoscience with fields of research that simply can't be modeled as precisely as physics or chemistry isn't super helpful. I feel that the label of pseudoscience should really be reserved for guerilla implementations of mythological practices that solely rely on individual and anecdotal, if not purely placebo influenced experience. Things that apparently offer treatment for critical illnesses, but offer no framework for testing the results or basis for it working. Acupuncture, homeopathy, Chiropractic, anything to do with life forces, Naturopathy, etc..

You've never seen egregious errors in physics or cs textbooks? Textbooks are often bad. That's not unique to psychology.

In my experience, CS textbooks often fail to expose concepts in logical order. Whenever I read over a paragraph in one of them, there always seem to be one or two terms that get thrown out there, but that aren't introduced until four chapters later. My impression is that CS texts overall presuppose that you are already knowledgable in CS.

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