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Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

Are there discoveries or theories from the field of psychology that are (a) not obvious and (b) generally regarded as correct?

For example, things like general relativity, continental drift, or evolution from the fields of physics, geology, and biology.

Does psychology have anything like that?

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For me the big one is unreliability of memory (particularly relevant in the context of eyewitness testimony) - all the Elizabeth Loftus stuff. That's solid science and results that were originally surprising but are now pretty much generally accepted.

Instinctual drift is somewhat counterintuitive. In particular, it's controversial how much it affects human behavior in modern society. But it replicates!

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

More generally, psychological concepts that can be tested in animals, particularly those found repeatedly in many different animals, can be pretty robust. It's experiments on humans that are hard, both for ethical reasons and because it's hard to "experiment" on something that's as smart as you are. But it's also specifically human cognitive psychology that makes the headlines.

While Kahneman and Tversky's mistakes have been widely touted by people who don't like them, many parts of prospect theory also replicate:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0886-x

Sure, but not that you'll hear about it if you do a search for "replication", and I suppose it also depends on whether you include brain science with psychology, as I do.

In my field (psychology/neuroimaging): injuries to the hippocampus obliterates the ability to form memories for associations between items/events (e.g. between multiple pieces of information in an episode space, time, items). However, it will not generally impair memory for individual items or features.

Children will often have worse memory than adults, but these differences are attenuated when you prevent adults from using or benefiting from organizational strategies at encoding and retrieval.

Is that kind of organizational prevention the one that involves having subjects count down mentally? I really enjoyed learning about memory. The visuospatial sketchpad holds a place in my heart.

all sorts of techniques. manipulation during encoding/learning can be as simple as not letting them know there will be a memory test. Using items that are novel and hard to provide a label.

I wrote this chapter primer on these aspects: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229525331_Children'...

the genetic influence on IQ increases with age

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/

Over the years I've been surprised by how well advertising works, and how easily people can be manipulated. I'd say it's obvious that these things could work at some level, but the magnitude and degree of sophistication still surprises me.

Maybe not psychology but a fun one in genetics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_ma...

Pavlov's dogs aka classical conditioning? Our understanding of how animals learn is fundamental to modern machine learning and AI.

Anchoring effect is a very simple one and easy to replicate.

But in general the psychology knowledge is a lot less certain than that of natural sciences, precisely because the experiments are very difficult to conduct and the results often turn out to be irreproducible.

Also, people are diverse and behave diversly and it is impossible to get a sample that represents humanity for your experiment.

Isn't that everything? We used to divine personality from the stars, or from bumps on the skull. We use to stab patients' brains and sever connections.

Everything is not obvious until you start applying some scientific method.

Not a psychology researcher, but I think that the Milgram experiment has been fairly well replicated. Please anyone let me know if not.

I personally found it to be non-obvious.

Milgram's results are also not as cut and dry as they are usually presented. Obedience rates varied wildly in subsequent variations he ran of the experiment and his initial experiment that got all the attention was a pretty low sample size.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...

“Many of Milgram’s participants believed it to be impossible that the prestigious Yale University experimenter would allow real harm to be inflicted on an experimental subject. Although Milgram claimed that 75% of his participants thought they were administering painful shocks, Perry’s re-analysis of the data showed that “It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those, two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter” (p. 163). Furthermore, she argues that many of those who did administer the maximum amount of shock did so because they were confident the shock wasn’t real or that the experiment was an elaborate ruse.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/...

That's still a shocking (no pun intended) percentage of people willing to inflict what they think is pain on another human based merely on the orders of an authority which they are not truly obliged to follow. I imagine the percentage of willing participants would be even higher if they had a real reason to follow the orders, e.g. it was actually their job and/or they would be punished in some way for failing to follow orders, as was the case in Nazi Germany.

Remember his initial experiment was only 40 people, so we’re talking 6 individuals who could very easily been outliers.

And I have my doubts that any of those 6 actually completey believed that a Yale psychology experiment was allowed to dangerously shock students, or that the student actors were all that believable.

I tend to think of it more like chemistry, in that once you understand how the small parts fit together and impact each other, it helps understand and predict results when more complex combinations of those parts are mixed together. And you can look at a complex result and break it down to know what parts it is made of.

The foundations of attachment theory are well replicated though the early experiments probably wouldn’t pass contemporary ethics standards.

The momentous and scandalous discovery of evolution can only be matched in the field of psychology by the discovery of the unconscious. All of the other responses here do not come close in importance to those massive upheavals you listed.

What do you mean when you say "discovery of the unconscious"? Depending how you define it such an idea was explored since antiquity.

That's a fair point, but we should also note that the mighty thinker Aristotle speculated seminal theories of relativity, continental drift, and evolution. I mean Freud's discovery of the unconscious as OP presumably means the discoveries of Einstein, Wegener, and Darwin respectively. Freud's scientific conception of the unconscious was a breakthrough beyond his progenitors.

I'll only admit I've cheated a little: that Freud's contribution was a scientific one is not an assertion that is "generally regarded as correct." But Freud believed himself to be a scientist and frankly I agree. It's not like Einstein, Wegener, and Darwin are uncontested figures, but certainly Freud is much more so.

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