Members in the Media
From: The New Yorker

The Crisis in Social Psychology That Isn’t

The New Yorker:

Things aren’t quite as bad as they seem, though. Although Natures report was headlined “Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology,” it scarcely noted that there have been some replications of experiments modelled on Dijksterhuis’s phenomenon. His finding could still out turn to be right, if weaker than first thought. More broadly, social priming is just one thread in the very rich fabric of social psychology. The field will survive, even if social priming turns out to have been overrated or an unfortunate detour.

The Reproducibility Project, from the Center for Open Science is now underway, with its first white paper on the psychology and sociology of replication itself. Thanks to Daniel Simons and Bobbie Spellman, the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science is now accepting submissions for a new section of each issue devoted to replicability. The journal Social Psychology is planning a special issue on replications for important results in social psychology, and has already received forty proposals. Other journals in neuroscience and medicine are engaged in similar efforts: my N.Y.U. colleague Todd Gureckis just used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to replicate a wide range of basic results in cognitive psychology. And just last week, Uri Simonsohn released a paper on coping with the famous file-drawer problem, in which failed studies have historically been underreported.

It’s worth remembering, too, that social psychology isn’t the only field affected by these problems—medicine, for example, has been coping with the same concerns. But as Brian Nosek, of the Center for Open Science, wrote to me in an e-mail, psychologists are specially equipped to deal with these issues. “Psychology is at the forefront of wrestling with reproducibility by turning its research expertise on itself,” he said.

Read the whole story: The New Yorker

See Barbara Spellman, Uri Simonsohn, & Brian Nosek at the 25th APS Annual Convention.

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Comments

The crisis is more than possibly real. It is devastating. And it is not so simple as failed replication.

the crisis consists in “replication of what?” The answer is “of demonstrations — not of serious scientific theory.”

As psychologists, we study and experiment on such topics a mind, memory, self, etc. But (and this is the big one!) we have no idea what our constructs refer to. They have no “sense”. For example, what is a “self?” Psychological Opinion ranges from concrete material entity to illusion. No consensus is in the offing (and so it is with the vast majority of our constructs and targets of inquiry).

Accordingly, the data are constantly in search of a referent. We are awash in data but we have no serious theoretical appreciation of what those data “mean.” Theory is at best superficial verbal opinion.

More, our aspirations to be a “real science’ are not only a failure, but are wrong headed. A science, requires (necessary, though not sufficient) the objects of study be both quantitative and objective. the latter is dealt with (actually dealt away) by fiat — subjectivity is epiphenomenal and therefore conveniently avoided.

But quantitative analysis is mind-numbing. For example, suppose I wish to study memory. I have a “theory” that predicts treatment X will enhance recall. I divide 100 folk randomly into an experimental (A) and control (B) group. each receives an identical list of 20 to-be-remembered words.

On completion, group A remembers 17 and group B recalls 12. Viola — theory confirmed.

But the numbers are quantitative labels disguising verbal description (more, less, equal). The theory would also be confirmed if I had obtained A = 12 and B = 7; of A = 20 and B = 5; and so forth.

In short, there is NO well-specified theory enabling parametric prediction (try this with a simple scientific formula, e.g., F = MA. If one changes F, one does not declare victory in virtue of finding A speeds up. there are actual numeric predictions (within the margins or measurement error).
The point — psychological theory (mostly) deals with theoretical specificity that cannot go much beyond “effect present/effect absent”.
And these binary oppositions (as opposed to real parametric predictions) make clear that theory in psychology is so very impoverished that reliance on its outcomes is fully incapable of serious discrimination between the non-nuance predictions of the hypothesis it is recruited to evaluate. accordingly, psychology is replete with micro theory based primarily on folk intuition and plausible stipulation.

In sum, there are serious foundational issue at play here. The question is not “Is psychology a science?”. that answer is NO. The question is (and remains) “should psychology aspire to be a science?” I think only time will tell (assuming our species does not finally stop circling the drain and take the plunge into the extinction so many evolutionary predecessors have taken).

Note – sorry if typos. But psychology is not worth a re-reading of this post. Writing it is all I have to offer on its behalf.


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