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Psychology Itself Is Under Scrutiny
h/t Instapundit[NYTimes] The urge to pull down statues extends well beyond the public squares of nations in turmoil. Lately it has been stirring the air in some corners of science, particularly psychology. In recent months, researchers and some journalists have strung cables around the necks of at least three monuments of the modern psychological canon: The famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which found that people playacting as guards quickly exhibited uncharacteristic cruelty. The landmark marshmallow test, which found that young children who could delay gratification showed greater educational achievement years later than those who could not. And the lesser known but influential concept of ego depletion ‐ the idea that willpower is like a muscle that can be built up but also tires. The assaults on these studies aren’t all new. Each is a story in its own right, involving debates over methodology and statistical bias that have surfaced before in some form. But since 2011, the psychology field has been giving itself an intensive background check, redoing more than 100 well-known studies. Often the original results cannot be reproduced, and the entire contentious process has been colored, inevitably, by generational change and charges of patriarchy. And if it cannot be reproduced, it's not science ...When Dr. Nosek published his first major replication paper in 2015, finding that about 60 percent of prominent studies did not pan out on a second try, it was a gift to skeptics eager to dismiss the entire field (and maybe all of social science) as a joke, a congregation of poorly anchored findings that shift in the wind, like nutrition advice. If it was only psychology, I could live with it Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-07-18 |
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