No one really likes killing your heroes but sometimes it must be done.
If psychology claims to be a science it MUST collectively accept this. However we must be sure to deal kindly with the people behind the ideas.
I'm an undergrad in psychology. To my dismay, there is no consensus that psychology should be a science. You still hear claims that humans are too great to be measured, etc. That we are more than material, and therefore can never be studied objectively.
Of course, I disagree with this (everything real can be measured in some way), but the problem runs way deeper. It is an epistemic disaster, where most students do not try to learn the first thing about epistemology. Without exaggeration, some psychologists just want to tell nice stories. I remain baffled. I'm hoping time solves the issue, because I sure don't have a solution.
For example Semmelweis 170 years ago. He gathered data and published findings, that patient mortality is greatly reduced if doctors disinfect their hands before treating patients. Other doctors took this suggestion as offensive, rejected his ideas and attacked him for suggesting them. He had a mental breakdown and died in an asylum.
> Rush continued to advocate his depletion therapy during the yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia in 1794 and 1797, although his reputation and practice were already waning. By 1797, William Cobbett, the satiric journalist who frequently targeted Rush, was in full cry. He reviewed the 1793 bills of mortality for Philadelphia and showed that the mortality rates increased significantly following the institution of Rush's remedies. He characterized Rush's work as “… one of those great discoveries which have contributed to the depopulation of the earth.” When Rush referred to calomel as the “Samson of medicine,” Cobbett wrote:
>> Dr. Rush in that emphatical style which is peculiar to himself calls mercury the Samson of medicine. In his hands and those of his partisans it may indeed be justly compared to Samson: for I verily believe they have slain more Americans with it than ever Samson slew of the Philistines. The Israelite slew his thousands, but the Rushites have slain their tens of thousands (28).
> Rush sued Cobbett for libel in 1797. The case dragged on for 2 years, probably due to political maneuvering by Rush's enemies. Cobbett was found guilty and fined $5000 (later reduced to $4250), at the time the largest award ever made in Pennsylvania. The damage had long since been done, however, and Rush's practice had vanished by 1797.
https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theoryte...
http://meehl.umn.edu/unpublished-material/philosophical-psyc...
For example, it would be difficult to perform a large Stanford Prison Experiment without any of the participants knowing about the Stanford Prison Experiment (which knowledge would taint the results). And if you select for ignorant participants, your sample is no longer random.
It should be noted that the SPE's methodology was totally fucked in the first place, and before reproducing it we'd need to actually perform it "right" at least once (which can't be done now that ethics* boards are a thing).
Sure, but so what? The point is that certain psychological experiments can, just by being known to the participants, have their results change, and this means in some sense there are fundamental problems with the replicatability of those experiments.
There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't, for ethical (no one should allow this experiment to be done) or material reasons (this experiment is very easy to conduct assuming you have multiple copies of the planet earth).
If these elements of human behavior cannot be confirmed by replicable experiments, what chance do we have of knowing about it. Claims about such behavior are nothing more than stories, for they are not based on evidence.
> There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't
There is no such thing as a 'scientific fact' that cannot be established by a replicated controlled experiment. The stated dichotomy is really important though, and one that it seems psychology has partially failed to make. For it lost its reputation by presenting 'stories' as scientific fact.
That is not to say there is no value in studying human behavior that is beyond science, but we need to realize that we cannot treat the result of this as 'scientifically true'. Instead, it is something like 'intuitively true based on anecdotal experience'.
So, I don't think thats the real problem. I think the main real problem is that in the failing fields they look for differences between groups while in the successful fields they look for "universal" rules.
False
There is really no excuse for them not trying to replicate each others studies this whole time to the point it was allowed to build into a crisis. That is a very old and well known part of the scientific method. So maybe they were somehow so ignorant of science that it was "good faith", which doesn't sound any better than doing it on purpose to me.
And psychology is hardly the only area of research, or even the worst, when it comes to this. Eg, medical research seems to be worse.
I think that this statement fails to account for the incentives for researchers: what kind of things they get success, praise, and support for doing. Despite their importance to the scientific project of any field, replicating experiments and publishing negative results are not rewarded the way that new studies with positive results are.
After completing the degree, I quit rather than produce fake science or spend my time trying to fight against those who are. I have been there, and have no pity for people who choose to produce fake science.
It took nearly 50 years for Piltdown Man to be exposed, likely because it told scientists what they wanted to hear.
https://hepweb.ucsd.edu/2dl/pasco/Millikans%20Oil%20Drop%20M...
Unfortunately but the most important basic studies of psychiatry were bullshit. And maybe they were in good faith, but it's incredibly hard to believe that. Freud, for instance, was either serial sex offender and mass-accomplice to sexual abuse, or an incredible rube ...
You see Freud saw sexual fantasies everywhere in women. They would fantasize about getting raped by this or that family member. There's a tiny little problem with that ...
It's come out in more than a few cases that these patients were in fact raped, assaulted and ... by family members and others. Afterwards these "patients" saw everyone's intentions to be sexual and expressed that by seeing sexual abuse everywhere and worrying about what would happen to them.
Strange, isn't it ? Freud never once saw it. God knows how many women tried to convince him to help them get justice, but it must have been over 100 at least. Never once did he help.
Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't.
He did lock quite a few of them away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freudian_Coverup
But no worries ! Since then we've vastly improved efficiency:
Intuitively people tend to think of random ideas to be 50/50 true or false. But, the space of possible vs actual means random ideas are almost always false. So, fields like medicine demonstrate you can spend generations looking into something and still be wildly wrong.
Freud like all early researchers had no idea what was going on. But, as a baseline to be improved upon he still provides part of a useful foundation for the discipline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947652
if after introduction of such a system, the number of "hysteria" diagnoses or whatever modern equivalent starts dropping substantially, it would prove Rush right.
I would like to point out that the more you read about this issue, the harder this is to believe.
I hadn't mentioned this, but obviously Freud had a clear financial incentive to enable and hide the sexual abuse that the people who paid for his services committed. And of course, there's the possibility (as some of his patients claim) that he himself also committed those acts, so he may have been protecting himself. (and I don't mean the weird and obviously sexual treatments used, I mean he may have actually raped his patients)
That's one.
Second is that even now there are very atrocious signs about psychiatry, and the other fields of psychiatry, like child services both academic and practice, as both have seen systematic, often legally supported abuse. Just read that link. Some of it, like the abuse in the Soviet Union is in the past.
Most of it is not.
The very basis of child services, the "show me on this anatomically correct doll ..." study was shown to be a fraud. Kids simply point out what they find interesting, and the outcome is random. No correlation to abuse at all. In the study, researchers simply lied about what the kids pointed out. Oops.
How many kids were locked away by child services because they pointed at the wrong part ? There can be no doubt that we're talking tens of thousands minimum.
And of course, https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=2335... . There are no words. The government is unwilling to stop it's use even when fraud was shown. And let's just not mention the question of retracting and fixing of decisions made in the past.
Very similar issues exist for mental services.
On the practice side there is open abuse as well. The main child services decision maker in Norway "used child porn" for 20 years (of course this person has also assigned kids to himself, because of course he did ... note that these children have not been taken away from him after he was found out, nor has he been jailed for what he did. Add to that that the organization he was part of is regularly accused of endemic racism, excessive violence, kidnapping, torture, and worse, causing the deaths of children)
That was 1 year ago. I mean I guess he was doing it for the past 20 years (minimum). But this person got caught 1 year ago. And the system, of course, supported him, after he got caught. How can anyone, at this point, believe that the organization of child services has, in the most generous interpretation, not been infiltrated and is being used to enable and legalize paedophilia, rather than prevent it ? Worst interpretation, of course, is that there never was any other goal. (in Norway, but equally horrifying scandals have occured in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy. And I'm pretty damn sure that's because I haven't checked many other countries, or just don't speak the language)
The only reason is "provides a useful foundation of the discipline" is that there are many people whose livelihood depends on this being true ... even when we know it's not just a lie, it was at least partly a bunch of criminals hiding their crimes ... And today, it's no different at least somewhat serve to help disgusting abusers and torturers to commit and hide their deeds.
Nor was it different in the past, as we now know plenty of scandals. Nor was it different under other systems. Democracies, dictatorships, communist states, monarchies, ... it doesn't matter, it happened in all of them. Christian, Muslim, atheist, militant atheist states ... and let's just quickly mention what Japan got caught doing : chemical weapons research on mental patients ... whose status as mental patients was established under very dubious circumstances. None have received compensation, or an apology, because of course not.
> you can spend generations looking into something and still be wildly wrong.
Unfortunately that is very clearly not what happened. Criminals and immoral politicians decided what sort of theory would be useful and the result of that is still used today as authoritative.
And even then we're disregarding the fact that even today results in psychology are so often rather thinly veiled frauds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel
Note how "trustworthy" this person was. Before he was found out, here's his biography:
Stapel obtained an M.A. in psychology and communications from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 1991.[3] In 1997 he obtained his Ph.D. cum laude in social psychology from the UvA.[3] He became professor at the University of Groningen in 2000[3] and moved to Tilburg University in 2006, where he founded TiBER, the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research.[3] In September 2010, Stapel became dean of the social and behavioral sciences faculty.[3]
Stapel received the "Career Trajectory Award" from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009
Needless to say, his book is used by child services and in the Netherlands, and they have not made any retractions, apologies, or changed any of their decisions (which result in incarcerating children) as a result of this.
At what point do we say "this is a total failure" and call these people off ? I guess they're just too useful for corrupt politicians.
Or perhaps they think you hold this opinion because they blindly suspect you don't think kids (or peoole in general) in trouble deserve care.
Under such criticism, how is it possible to demand publically verifiable care, if the moment one demands it you are branded as cheaping out on poor souls???
It's true. You've got to get your hands dirty. I'm confident I learned as much about the Dark Triad from repeatedly stabbing Delroy Paulhus as I did from merely reading his work.