> If, on the other hand, you just dumped all those psychology researchers out of the academic environment and sent them to marketing and advertising companies..

> If, on the other hand, you just dumped all those psychology researchers out of the academic environment and sent them to marketing and advertising companies... are we better off? Honestly? Very possibly. The reason is that regardless of your opinion of marketing/advertising (mine is not overly positive while acknowledging that informing consumers of new products etc is a worthwhile endeavour broadly speaking) at least if the psychology researchers were trying to implement whatever their pet theory is in a company the market will quite quickly let them know whether or not it is horseshit. Markets have faults of course but at least if the psychological theories were implemented at companies you could reasonably easily tell if they were effective or not simply based on do they increase sales etc. If they turn out to be nonsense, this acts as a signal to the individual as well as others that this avenue of study is not worth further exploration. Whereas Academia can often act as an artificial greenhouse environment for theories/hypotheses that won't survive contact with the real world but seem quite successful in the artificial environment.