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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

It's quite shocking to me how many social science and social psychology experiments have been debunked in recent years. It's as if the whole field is filled with false research. They should do what psychology has done and start a massive replication effort of most cited results. [0] That should bring back some credibility back to the field.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-rep...

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Social psychology is very hard. Making correct experiments is hard, costly, often unethical and highly culture-dependent.

You can only get so far with questionnaire handled to middle-class/high-class university students...

Yes, so researchers must be very careful to caveat their findings. Not only as footnotes in the middle of the article but also in general terms in abstract and introduction as those are the sections copied into newspapers and such. My 2c.

The stakes become even higher when people attempt to use Social Psychology as either the basis for moral frameworks or in evaluating morality. This can be problematic for a multitude of reasons (bias being the largest), and the biggest offender I've found is Jonathan Haidt and his 4 moral evaluators. Actually, I think in The Righteous Mind he's up to 5 now, time will tell if that continues to change with continued "no comment" about how, maybe, his approach is flawed.

Is that a defense or an indictment?

Plus I would expect it would also be a function of the legal system. Some countries like France are typically hostile to self-defence / vigilanties as opposed to a country like the US. If you intervene and the assaulter gets hurt, you might be in significant legal troubles.

I was shocked to learn about the difference a while back, especially concerning first aid. In Germany you are facing criminal charges if you dont aid injured people, by either first aid or calling an ambulance. Then you have countries where not even dragging a person out of a burning car is protected under good Samaritan laws.

Societal norms are constantly evolving; what is normal today might have been unthinkable in the past when these studies were conducted.

Or the surveillance cameras have pushed people to act because it looks awesome on youtube.

I think awareness of the effect changes the behavior more - at least for me - I usually wouldn't act in situations where someone needed help because I don't feel particularly qualified but knowing that nobody else is likely to respond I try to help.

This makes social science even less reliable.

> nobody else is likely to respond

They are now. But maybe after some time everyone will think someone will help them anyway and stop. And so the cycle continues.

I just try to help untill I see someone more qualified take over to avoid the issue. Don't know if it's because I'm aware of this effect or just maturing but I know when I was younger I just avoided situations like this and I had a few recently where I did actually try to help.

Also; awareness of the bystander effect may have led to increased pro-activeness. This is really something that would need to have data going further back to figure out if the original effect existed.

See another post in this thread where someone has recieved specific training to counteract the bystander effect.

This. Debunked is the wrong word (clickbait). It's a great thing if the bystander effect can be overcome or nullified.

I doubt that average Joe would know anything about bystander effect studies.

I have come across the bystander effect often enough in popular culture, that I would say a very significant amount of people is aware of the concept, even if they might not remember its specific name.

I guess you're in USA, I'd expect it to be a large minority in UK - everyone who ever did a first-aid course should know about it for starters.

also, the way I read it is that bystander effect was posited to be something like

  nobody else is doing anything and therefore I won't do anything

but if society has changed and somebody does get involved, it would be more like

  that other guy is doing something and therefore I will get involved too

because we are social animals and we do what feels right, what we see others doing. So, although the outcomes might have changed, the process is still the same.

I remember reading a book some years ago (Lauren Slater, Opening Skinners Box) about some of the psychological experiments which had been done in the past. One of the general conclusions of those experiments that stood out to me seemed to be that only about 30% of people would actively take initiative if given the chance, but that generall people would follow social leads. I remember passing this book around at work to a couple of friends who both said that they felt that reading about this concept made them feel as if they were more aware of the social pressures to not act in situations and that they would therefore be more likely to step up as a result.

Yep. I used not to act in situations, because I assumed it is not my business, that I will look like nosy idiot who messes into things without them being her business and nothing is the correct/expected/respectful action. Some articles I read convinced me of the opposite, that it is ok for me to react and the previous passive strategy often amounts to enabling.

Therefore, I act differently now.

Even with flawed studies aside, the word science is used very liberally to describe these fields. Even psychology’s most robust and well tested theories can’t come anywhere close to making accurate predictions.

No field of science made accurate predictions when it started. It took centuries of hard work to arrive at the levels of precision and accuracy that we take for granted in, say, physics or chemistry.

And psychology is attempting to study phenomena that are far more complex than anything in physics or chemistry. Being wrong or incomplete, doesn’t mean it’s not science.

While most of what you just said is open to debate, I was merely commenting on the scientific maturity of the fields. Which to me seem relevant to a discussion on the debunking of it’s theories.

To be frank, this study likely did not debunk anything.

Even 30 years ago, psychologists had outlined the criteria by which the bystander effect does not occur. A well known criterion (seen in many comments on HN) is to direct your plea for help to a single individual amongst the bystanders ("You! Call 911!" as opposed to "Someone call 911!"). Another aspect that's been known for over 30 years is that if someone in the crowd feels (s)he is an outsider, that person is a lot more likely to intervene.

Did they account for these in the study? How will they determine if a particular person thought of himself as an outsider? If they did not account for these, then the article is attacking a strawman.

One result that disagrees with other results does not "debunk" anything. It merely changes our confidence in the hypothesis.

It's not even clear that this result contradicts that social psych result.

Debunked = Clickbait.

Nullified or reversed is different than debunked.

Flat-earth theory is debunked. This is not even close to that.

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