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Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn't reach academic text quickly, because
by skytrue 9y ago
Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn't reach academic text quickly, because of the bureaucracy that exists inside the APA (American Psychological Association). See the controversy around the most recent version of the DSM.
I've observed that academics in the field will often take theory as most likely fact, if only because the actual published academic material hasn't caught up yet, but they've all been to the various conferences that are relevant to their particular field (social psychology, cognitive, etc).
Any study that is citing materials from over 20 years ago is grossly outdated. Many of the materials from even 10 years ago are becoming outdated. And now, more recently, we've started to examine the racial bias that exists in our systems of research, so I expect past material to come under even further scrutiny.
- breck 9y agoSome people have researched this. I remember reading "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Arbesman, and IIRC psychology papers had some of the lowest half-lives of all the sciences. In math the half-life of a paper was something like 85 years, but in pysch it was closer to 10. I forget the exact statistics and don't have the book here but it was pretty interesting. Scientometrics and Eurekometrics are two areas of research that delve into this sort of thing more.