10 ms·

I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is

165 points by Ariarule 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
As I read the article, it occurred to me that one of the fundamental flaws of modern psychology (and its offshoots such as psychiatry and psychotherapy) is that they all tend toward a solipsistic, individualist treatment of the self. Other than specialized fields like group psychology, psychologists really try to ignore the collectivist aspect to societies; they try to treat one person at a time while ignoring our families, our communities. When they do make efforts at integrating these larger groups in treatment, it's an afterthought, and it's never quite consensual, because, after all, in this world, to treat someone (especially to drug someone) you require their direct consent, and even in couples therapy, there is usually one less-than-willing partner who just accedes to keep things together. Furthermore, it's always through an attitude of "here is one person who is ill and needs to heal, let's rally around him for his treatment." That is not how it works. People develop mental illnesses oftentimes from traumas and abuse and decades of shame. Therefore, the entire family, the whole community, needs to make efforts at healing if they are to stop this vicious circle. It is not merely one man's problem, it is not one man's responsibility, and it is not one man's shame. Speaking personally, the genesis of my mental issues is clearly not "chemical imbalance" but rather my relationship to the world. What I heard and saw on TV, my experiences with Mom, Dad, and Sister, my formative years in school and church--with, you guessed it, other people. I see a lot of pop-psychology YouTube clickbait that goes "Heal your relationships! Here's how!" and I don't doubt that people can take certain action with willing parties and heal certain relationships, but geez, guys, it took me 50 years to get to this point of isolation and alienation, and I alone will never heal relationships that have taken such a beating. It would take collective, cooperative will and action to do so. Treating one person at a time with these methods is like trying to catch the ocean and dye it green, one drop at a time. It just doesn't make sense. That's only one of many reasons why there are poor outcomes, especially for psychiatry, where they just toss you in a looney bin with lots of other messed-up people, and now that's your community and that's your reality, deal with it.
- hvs 3y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you say, but it's not a complete wash. I know if I go off my meds I go to a bad place pretty quickly. That's not society, that's something a bit off with pile of cells that I currently call "me." Humans and society are messy. There aren't easy answers and we are a culture dying for easy answers. Sometimes it really does help to have an impartial person sitting there just letting you bitch once a week. Sometimes it doesn't.
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Same here. I’m bipolar. Modern medicine and therapy has allowed me to have good quality of life instead of barely surviving with increasingly severe manic episodes. Somehow enough progress is made in the real world that psychology manages to meaningfully advance.
    - niemal_dev 3y ago
      The fact you embrace and accept metabolic damaging substances (all psychiatric substances are) and lack some very critical understanding in mitochondrial DNA damage and ATP production bottlenecks down on the cellular level is fascinating (which were the reason you had manic episodes to begin with if we were to make an educated guess). You are basically digesting and taking substances that further damage you and in the long-term are going to make you even worse. "Meaningful advice" like that is what keeps people enslaved to big-pharma and the largest human enslaved era the human history has ever witnessed.
      - jhardy54 3y ago
        Where did you get your medical degree?
        kayodelycaon 3y ago
        I think they read this study and didn't read the details: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.546801/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.5468... There's a lot of neat stuff in there but no real conclusions to draw from it beyond a potential avenue for further research. I'd like to see what comes out of it.
ketzo 3y ago
If you liked this, do yourself a favor and dig through the author's archive. Insightful, funny writer who takes a really pragmatic view of his own field in a time of great upheaval. Can't recommend him enough.
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
In the words of a psych professor in college, “Psychology is still struggling to become a science.”
- ggm 3y ago
  I think it was put out from adult supervision far too soon. Sociology also. I think the only path back may be mandatory reproduction, before publication in the lead journals. If it isn't duplicated, it ain't happening.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    It seems to have coincided with when pharma figured out how much money there was to be had with official sounding diagnosis names and treatment plans. Not to say there aren't any helpful drugs in the category. There are, but there's also quite a lot of tagging people with a narrowly-defined condition and prescribing the latest we-don't-really-know-how-it-works thing.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Where are these super-adults who are even more wizened than the psychology professors in the field already are? :-)
davesque 3y ago
This article made me laugh out loud more than once. My favorite quote: > Plenty of these findings are interesting and some are useful (especially if you are a rich, lonely monkey). You'll have to read the article for the context.
huitzitziltzin 3y ago
IMO there is a pretty simple partial explanation: no one reads anyone else’s research. When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that. Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  yeah but how many people are reading math papers? if anything, math papers are harder to read compared to psychology papers . yet math does not have this problem.
  - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
    I have no idea of the scale of this problem in math. Maybe you do. The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      In math you have subsets of researchers who read each other's papers and work over a few decades to explore something, returning various nuggets and conclusions to the general body of mathematicians along the way until the whole thing is worked out. Eventually, in the most successful cases, the work is condensed into a book or something and a lot of people read it. It is a lot, perhaps thousands of times, harder to come up with theorems than it is to teach them, and atop that even harder to come up with broadly applicable yet effective conceptual systems (which can be introduced in a couple pages once you know which axioms are going to produce all the right facts later on), which is the basis for the whole enterprise.
  - 3y ago
ed-209 3y ago
> There’s a paper written by both Ariely and Gino in which they might have independently faked the data for two separate studies in the same article. Two fakers collaborating might equally have conspired. Either way this is hilarious.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
“Participants said they wanted cleaning products more after they were forced to argue against something they believed (vs. arguing for the thing they believed).” So glad for studies like this. Psychology might be too complex for the current scientific method. Millions of variables and not enough humans to control.
mdorazio 3y ago
Do yourself a favor and read the whole article. The author does a fantastic job of summing up the big issues facing psychology and a lot of my own thoughts regarding the academic side of the social sciences in general. So very few people in the field seem to care about the basics of the scientific method (reproducible experiments, hypotheses that can be falsified, etc.) or of producing research that can really be applied in useful ways. And unfortunately so much of it seems to bleed over into pop science and business "coaching" these days, too.
- jschveibinz 3y ago
  Re: lack of scientific method, education is another psych-related field with the same problem. Try reading a few of the foundational or trendy education articles: the articles that actually affect how teachers are taught to educate kids. Then look at the methods used in these articles, and realize that some of them have sample sizes of 20 or 30 children. In other words, the conclusions are useless.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    A sample size of thirty could be sufficient if the effect being tested for is strong enough.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      depends how you're sampling the population, doesn't it? if the sample is drawn only from, say, students from the same class at a particular boarding school, how likely are the effects to apply to the entire population of students?
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        It depends on what the effect is and the hypotheses you are attempting to distinguish between. Sometimes you have to use your brain and think about it; science is not all randomized controlled trials, p values and curve fitting. :)
paulpauper 3y ago
Let us assume half of studies do not replicate. this does not tell us about the implications of those that do. I think there is the tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water here. STEM, especially computer science, has its own bullshit papers problem too. Arxiv is full of 7-page computer science papers with 7 -co authors about things that feel like pure resume padding and very light on any sort of actual science or rigour. stuff like "hate speech and the algorithms on twitter" Same for math papers in which common formulas are rederived. The problem is the incentives are aligned to favor quantity over quality, and this is in all fields . a huge resume/cv full of items looks more impressive.
dang 3y ago
Previous threads in this saga (and some related ones). Others? I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315292 - Aug 2023 (94 comments) Is it defamation to point out scientific research fraud? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 - Aug 2023 (13 comments) Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36968670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36968670 - Aug 2023 (146 comments) Fabricated data in research about honesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907829 - July 2023 (46 comments) Fraudulent data raise questions about superstar honesty researcher (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726485 - July 2023 (33 comments) UCLA professor refuses to cover for Dan Ariely in issue of data provenance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684242 - July 2023 (131 comments) Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665247 - July 2023 (215 comments) Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424090 - June 2023 (201 comments) Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” – Data Colada - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 - June 2023 (7 comments) Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 - Aug 2021 (102 comments) A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out to Be Based on Fake Data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 - Aug 2021 (90 comments) Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 - Aug 2021 (51 comments)
javajosh 3y ago
If you tell people 60% of the DSM-V[0] is fake, they might wake up and listen. Assuming that the DSM-V is based on peer-reviewed research, that ought to be the case.) 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5
- hliyan 3y ago
  Psychiatrists and psychologists may not be working the same way.
esbeeb 3y ago
A scathing lambastement.
momirlan 3y ago
just shows that much of academia is just smoke and mirrors. a cosplay with breaches.
bsmith89 3y ago
While I strongly empathize with the author's feelings on this (I've had similar feelings in my own field), I also want to voice an opposing viewpoint: > Good/useful/valuable/important/positive-ROI science doesn't necessarily require everyone to know what the major discoveries are nor even care when 60% of studies fail to replicate. Handful of reasons I feel this way: - If I care deeply about exactly 10 of the 100 publications in my sub-field, and you care about a different 10, it may not matter much to either of us when 60 of them are later refuted. I may have not cared about those specific conclusions, already been skeptical about them, or have several other studies and my own unpublished results to maintain my confidence in the broader idea. - While we all have great examples of dramatic upheavals in _other_ people's fields — pick your favorite of cosmology, genetic engineering, mathematics, etc. — when you're immersed in it, science is much more incremental, subtle, and complex. Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. Scientific progress is not a series of miracles. - Relatedly, I'm guessing most scientists are much more aware of the shortcomings in their own and their peers' research. Do keep this in mind while reading the perspective of an insider. Be skeptical, by all means, but not only of psychology.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  > Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202012/dunning-kruger-isnt-real https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... I find the irony in this context particularly rich.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  If Einstein's paper on Special Relativity were proven wrong there would be quite a stir. Is there such a paper in psychology carrying such weight? Or even a central idea?
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    All of the central ideas in psychology are actually cribbed from philosophy (very selectively and almost never with attribution because you know, we're doing "science"; biased toward material that can be wrenched into guidance for "positive outcomes" that get the grants and TED talk invites), while all the data is extraordinarily messy, mantled under mouldering traditions of associating ones product with the group protection of a figurehead "school" (i.e. so-and-so's Biopsychoturbochemo Model) highly resistant or essentially unsuited to normalization, and of course unrepeatable in any rigorous sense. The biggest difference between psychology, (alongsid its armed infantry counterpart psychiatry,) is that unlike math or physics or chemistry, which are all intrinsically descriptive, psychology is concerned with how to change behavior that has not yet happened. Not to describe phenomena that already exist but have not been encountered or formally described yet.
gnramires 3y ago
I'm not a psychologist, but I believe CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has made pretty good progress in the recent decades. Is that correct? I think studying well defined and important things is... extremely important :) I think for example it should be possible to measure remission from depression. I also think though that psychology could 'make philosophy out of its physics' (in an analogy with an experimental field like chemistry or material science), and form theories about happiness, well being, etc.. that are grounded in insightful philosophies. And then try to measure or make some progress and recommendations to guide the field (like, how should we define well being, how should we measure it, and what kind of interventions help it).
- spicymapotofu 3y ago
  Much to be said about the second half of your comment, enough that I'll leave it to the better educated. On the former, an article titled "the declining effect of CBT" was foundational to my disillusionment regarding new therapy techniques. Nothing is new under the sun, but fresh techniques often overperform in talk therapy studies. A long symbiotic relationship between providers and those in need have resulted in a blooming field, and metastudies generally show all talk therapies as slightly more effective than [only] drugs, and all drugs as [only!] slightly more effective than no intervention.
- aftoprokrustes 3y ago
  I am not of the field, bit did dig into the CBT hole (both reading and consulting a trained therapist), and I have the impression that the effects are overstated (and, at least for me, this was totally the wrong approach). The main issue I see with the studies I tried to look at was that they compared the answers to some psychometric scales between people following a CBT method and people following "talk therapy". My problem with it is that, while CBT is pretty formalized and can be "administered" in a not so terrible way even by an if-statement based chatbot [1], "talk therapy" is a very broad category, and the effects will be mostly dependent on not only the skill of the therapist, but also the fit between the therapist and the client. So yes, CBT will consistently give small results, but comparing it to consulting a random non-CBT therapist is as absurd as comparing the travel time by bus to the travel time by jumping in and out of random trains until you reach the destination. [1] before I get attacked on this: I do not say that there are no good therapists with CBT training - but I am confident most of them would still be very good even without the training or method.
raincole 3y ago
I don't even know whether I should read pop-science books any more. Or read anything any more. At one point the 10,000 hours rule was so popular that it almost became common sense. And it's bull. Ego depletion was so well known. And boom it's not replicable either. Is everything just food pyramid?
- strangattractor 3y ago
  I suppose but if someone actually practices something for 10K hours they are almost certainly going to be considerably better at it than people that do not even come close to that much practice. As they say in Pirates of the Caribbean - it's not a rule - think of them more as guidelines. I have always approached those types of books as opinion rather than fact. I think they are important for expanding ones views.
  - raincole 3y ago
    I mean yes the more you pratice the better you get... but it's hardly worth a HN comment, let alone a whole book. Let alone multiple books. The real problem of the 10,000 hour rule is that it implis all the skills and professions are equally hard.
    - strangattractor 3y ago
      Agreed
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Everything is most likely just origami echoes of thermodynamics
LegitShady 3y ago
agree or not, the author is a great writer with some hilarious lines. "I am just bunch of bees!"
zug_zug 3y ago
Psychology is the study of the most complex machine in existence, a machine smart enough to do psychology. Of course it's really difficult to test it compared to simpler sciences. But if the author is trying to insinuate no meaningful progress in psychology was made in the last X years because of some twitter poll then that's doubtful -- scientists getting to the point they can scan neurons and reconstruct what you see through the activations. I do agree that you could generate endless reams of pseudo-data about the human behavior by labeling and classifying tiny patterns, and that that's not very practical. But that doesn't invalidate the rest. Perhaps one way to operationalize psychology would be to take a huge dataset, e.g. 1 million tinder profiles, and have a contest to identify the .1% that got married or something (and how long they stayed married for).
- barrysteve 3y ago
  The idea that you can read minds or reconstruct 'thought pictures', as if that's something everybody has, is going to require a lot of evidence. How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love. The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind. Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense. Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.
scrubs 3y ago
Great read
rPlayer6554 3y ago
My question after reading is, why aren't psychologists focusing their effort on real problems? Some of the "problems" the listed articles bring up seem vague and useless. I am not even vaguely familiar with this field, so I hesitate to assert any more than that. Other fields have useful problems they solve and that's were famous breakthroughs come from. Who cares if monkeys are paying for sex if people are killing themselves from depression? Are there not tons of psychological illnesses where progress could be made in new techniques to help people live their lives well? Maybe reduce the need for drugs?
owenversteeg 3y ago
Great summary of the field and very well written. Particularly: >The second formerly useful proto-paradigm is something like “situations matter.” This idea maintains that people's contexts have immense power over their behavior, and the strongest version maintains that the only difference between sinners and saints is their situations. The most famous psychology studies of all time are “situations matter” studies: the Milgram shock experiments, the Asch conformity studies, the bystander effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment (since revealed to be much more of a scripted play than a study). The now-much-ridiculed “social priming” studies, like the one where you unscramble words about being old and then walk more slowly, are also “situations matter” studies. So are “nudges,” where tiny changes in situations bring big changes in behavior, like redoing the layout of a cafeteria to encourage people to eat more veggies. Does anyone know any good situationist studies aside from the big names?
derbOac 3y ago
The irony of the piece is that psychology's greatest contribution to science over the last several decades is probably meta-science, or empirical introspection about the scientific process itself. Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere. The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around. What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come. Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science. Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.
esbeeb 3y ago
Silly question: why can't an AI be written which can read through all these piles of psychology papers, looking for various kinds of characteristics of fraudulent or sloppy scholarship, then summarizing its findings, assigning suggested reputation scores to various papers and authors?
- spicymapotofu 3y ago
  The line that separates good psych science from bad is more subtle than word choice or tone, and often researchers who primarily do good work may present work with faulty conclusions without anyone knowing better. It has taken decades for the replication crisis to take this shape, and maneuvering of data, subjects, and results toward outcomes that don't reproduce is systematic and subtle. I'm not suggesting AI couldn't find this distinction, but what remains after is the rigorous proving of the AI conclusion - which might take just as long as if AI wasn't involved.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Isn't marketing psychology? People will buy something with probability x% if you hammer it into their eyeballs N times. Looks like hard enough science. And one responsible for half of NASDAQ market cap :)
blastersyndrome 3y ago
Let me ask a simple question: What can be done about this, other than violence? I do not see a legal path going forward where all these corrupt individuals get removed from their positions of power. An eye for an eye.
- em-bee 3y ago
  play the long game and focus on better moral education. instead of just focusing on STEM schools need to teach children what is ethically good behavior. it won't eliminate the problem entirely, but it should reduce it drastically.

165 points by Ariarule 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

As I read the article, it occurred to me that one of the fundamental flaws of modern psychology (and its offshoots such as psychiatry and psychotherapy) is that they all tend toward a solipsistic, individualist treatment of the self. Other than specialized fields like group psychology, psychologists really try to ignore the collectivist aspect to societies; they try to treat one person at a time while ignoring our families, our communities. When they do make efforts at integrating these larger groups in treatment, it's an afterthought, and it's never quite consensual, because, after all, in this world, to treat someone (especially to drug someone) you require their direct consent, and even in couples therapy, there is usually one less-than-willing partner who just accedes to keep things together. Furthermore, it's always through an attitude of "here is one person who is ill and needs to heal, let's rally around him for his treatment." That is not how it works. People develop mental illnesses oftentimes from traumas and abuse and decades of shame. Therefore, the entire family, the whole community, needs to make efforts at healing if they are to stop this vicious circle. It is not merely one man's problem, it is not one man's responsibility, and it is not one man's shame. Speaking personally, the genesis of my mental issues is clearly not "chemical imbalance" but rather my relationship to the world. What I heard and saw on TV, my experiences with Mom, Dad, and Sister, my formative years in school and church--with, you guessed it, other people. I see a lot of pop-psychology YouTube clickbait that goes "Heal your relationships! Here's how!" and I don't doubt that people can take certain action with willing parties and heal certain relationships, but geez, guys, it took me 50 years to get to this point of isolation and alienation, and I alone will never heal relationships that have taken such a beating. It would take collective, cooperative will and action to do so. Treating one person at a time with these methods is like trying to catch the ocean and dye it green, one drop at a time. It just doesn't make sense. That's only one of many reasons why there are poor outcomes, especially for psychiatry, where they just toss you in a looney bin with lots of other messed-up people, and now that's your community and that's your reality, deal with it.

hvs 3y ago
I agree with a lot of what you say, but it's not a complete wash. I know if I go off my meds I go to a bad place pretty quickly. That's not society, that's something a bit off with pile of cells that I currently call "me." Humans and society are messy. There aren't easy answers and we are a culture dying for easy answers. Sometimes it really does help to have an impartial person sitting there just letting you bitch once a week. Sometimes it doesn't.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Same here. I’m bipolar. Modern medicine and therapy has allowed me to have good quality of life instead of barely surviving with increasingly severe manic episodes. Somehow enough progress is made in the real world that psychology manages to meaningfully advance.
  - niemal_dev 3y ago
    The fact you embrace and accept metabolic damaging substances (all psychiatric substances are) and lack some very critical understanding in mitochondrial DNA damage and ATP production bottlenecks down on the cellular level is fascinating (which were the reason you had manic episodes to begin with if we were to make an educated guess). You are basically digesting and taking substances that further damage you and in the long-term are going to make you even worse. "Meaningful advice" like that is what keeps people enslaved to big-pharma and the largest human enslaved era the human history has ever witnessed.
    - jhardy54 3y ago
      Where did you get your medical degree?
      - kayodelycaon 3y ago
        I think they read this study and didn't read the details: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.546801/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.5468... There's a lot of neat stuff in there but no real conclusions to draw from it beyond a potential avenue for further research. I'd like to see what comes out of it.

ketzo 3y ago

If you liked this, do yourself a favor and dig through the author's archive. Insightful, funny writer who takes a really pragmatic view of his own field in a time of great upheaval. Can't recommend him enough.

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

In the words of a psych professor in college, “Psychology is still struggling to become a science.”

ggm 3y ago
I think it was put out from adult supervision far too soon. Sociology also. I think the only path back may be mandatory reproduction, before publication in the lead journals. If it isn't duplicated, it ain't happening.
- tyingq 3y ago
  It seems to have coincided with when pharma figured out how much money there was to be had with official sounding diagnosis names and treatment plans. Not to say there aren't any helpful drugs in the category. There are, but there's also quite a lot of tagging people with a narrowly-defined condition and prescribing the latest we-don't-really-know-how-it-works thing.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Where are these super-adults who are even more wizened than the psychology professors in the field already are? :-)

davesque 3y ago

This article made me laugh out loud more than once. My favorite quote: > Plenty of these findings are interesting and some are useful (especially if you are a rich, lonely monkey). You'll have to read the article for the context.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

IMO there is a pretty simple partial explanation: no one reads anyone else’s research. When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that. Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.

paulpauper 3y ago
yeah but how many people are reading math papers? if anything, math papers are harder to read compared to psychology papers . yet math does not have this problem.
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  I have no idea of the scale of this problem in math. Maybe you do. The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    In math you have subsets of researchers who read each other's papers and work over a few decades to explore something, returning various nuggets and conclusions to the general body of mathematicians along the way until the whole thing is worked out. Eventually, in the most successful cases, the work is condensed into a book or something and a lot of people read it. It is a lot, perhaps thousands of times, harder to come up with theorems than it is to teach them, and atop that even harder to come up with broadly applicable yet effective conceptual systems (which can be introduced in a couple pages once you know which axioms are going to produce all the right facts later on), which is the basis for the whole enterprise.
- 3y ago

ed-209 3y ago

> There’s a paper written by both Ariely and Gino in which they might have independently faked the data for two separate studies in the same article. Two fakers collaborating might equally have conspired. Either way this is hilarious.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

“Participants said they wanted cleaning products more after they were forced to argue against something they believed (vs. arguing for the thing they believed).” So glad for studies like this. Psychology might be too complex for the current scientific method. Millions of variables and not enough humans to control.

mdorazio 3y ago

Do yourself a favor and read the whole article. The author does a fantastic job of summing up the big issues facing psychology and a lot of my own thoughts regarding the academic side of the social sciences in general. So very few people in the field seem to care about the basics of the scientific method (reproducible experiments, hypotheses that can be falsified, etc.) or of producing research that can really be applied in useful ways. And unfortunately so much of it seems to bleed over into pop science and business "coaching" these days, too.

jschveibinz 3y ago
Re: lack of scientific method, education is another psych-related field with the same problem. Try reading a few of the foundational or trendy education articles: the articles that actually affect how teachers are taught to educate kids. Then look at the methods used in these articles, and realize that some of them have sample sizes of 20 or 30 children. In other words, the conclusions are useless.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  A sample size of thirty could be sufficient if the effect being tested for is strong enough.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    depends how you're sampling the population, doesn't it? if the sample is drawn only from, say, students from the same class at a particular boarding school, how likely are the effects to apply to the entire population of students?
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      It depends on what the effect is and the hypotheses you are attempting to distinguish between. Sometimes you have to use your brain and think about it; science is not all randomized controlled trials, p values and curve fitting. :)

paulpauper 3y ago

Let us assume half of studies do not replicate. this does not tell us about the implications of those that do. I think there is the tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water here. STEM, especially computer science, has its own bullshit papers problem too. Arxiv is full of 7-page computer science papers with 7 -co authors about things that feel like pure resume padding and very light on any sort of actual science or rigour. stuff like "hate speech and the algorithms on twitter" Same for math papers in which common formulas are rederived. The problem is the incentives are aligned to favor quantity over quality, and this is in all fields . a huge resume/cv full of items looks more impressive.

dang 3y ago

Previous threads in this saga (and some related ones). Others? I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37315292 - Aug 2023 (94 comments) Is it defamation to point out scientific research fraud? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 - Aug 2023 (13 comments) Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36968670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36968670 - Aug 2023 (146 comments) Fabricated data in research about honesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907829 - July 2023 (46 comments) Fraudulent data raise questions about superstar honesty researcher (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36726485 - July 2023 (33 comments) UCLA professor refuses to cover for Dan Ariely in issue of data provenance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684242 - July 2023 (131 comments) Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665247 - July 2023 (215 comments) Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424090 - June 2023 (201 comments) Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” – Data Colada - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 - June 2023 (7 comments) Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 - Aug 2021 (102 comments) A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out to Be Based on Fake Data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 - Aug 2021 (90 comments) Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 - Aug 2021 (51 comments)

javajosh 3y ago

If you tell people 60% of the DSM-V[0] is fake, they might wake up and listen. Assuming that the DSM-V is based on peer-reviewed research, that ought to be the case.) 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5

hliyan 3y ago
Psychiatrists and psychologists may not be working the same way.

esbeeb 3y ago

A scathing lambastement.

momirlan 3y ago

just shows that much of academia is just smoke and mirrors. a cosplay with breaches.

bsmith89 3y ago

While I strongly empathize with the author's feelings on this (I've had similar feelings in my own field), I also want to voice an opposing viewpoint: > Good/useful/valuable/important/positive-ROI science doesn't necessarily require everyone to know what the major discoveries are nor even care when 60% of studies fail to replicate. Handful of reasons I feel this way: - If I care deeply about exactly 10 of the 100 publications in my sub-field, and you care about a different 10, it may not matter much to either of us when 60 of them are later refuted. I may have not cared about those specific conclusions, already been skeptical about them, or have several other studies and my own unpublished results to maintain my confidence in the broader idea. - While we all have great examples of dramatic upheavals in _other_ people's fields — pick your favorite of cosmology, genetic engineering, mathematics, etc. — when you're immersed in it, science is much more incremental, subtle, and complex. Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. Scientific progress is not a series of miracles. - Relatedly, I'm guessing most scientists are much more aware of the shortcomings in their own and their peers' research. Do keep this in mind while reading the perspective of an insider. Be skeptical, by all means, but not only of psychology.

marcus_holmes 3y ago
> Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202012/dunning-kruger-isnt-real https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... I find the irony in this context particularly rich.
strangattractor 3y ago
If Einstein's paper on Special Relativity were proven wrong there would be quite a stir. Is there such a paper in psychology carrying such weight? Or even a central idea?
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  All of the central ideas in psychology are actually cribbed from philosophy (very selectively and almost never with attribution because you know, we're doing "science"; biased toward material that can be wrenched into guidance for "positive outcomes" that get the grants and TED talk invites), while all the data is extraordinarily messy, mantled under mouldering traditions of associating ones product with the group protection of a figurehead "school" (i.e. so-and-so's Biopsychoturbochemo Model) highly resistant or essentially unsuited to normalization, and of course unrepeatable in any rigorous sense. The biggest difference between psychology, (alongsid its armed infantry counterpart psychiatry,) is that unlike math or physics or chemistry, which are all intrinsically descriptive, psychology is concerned with how to change behavior that has not yet happened. Not to describe phenomena that already exist but have not been encountered or formally described yet.

gnramires 3y ago

I'm not a psychologist, but I believe CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has made pretty good progress in the recent decades. Is that correct? I think studying well defined and important things is... extremely important :) I think for example it should be possible to measure remission from depression. I also think though that psychology could 'make philosophy out of its physics' (in an analogy with an experimental field like chemistry or material science), and form theories about happiness, well being, etc.. that are grounded in insightful philosophies. And then try to measure or make some progress and recommendations to guide the field (like, how should we define well being, how should we measure it, and what kind of interventions help it).

spicymapotofu 3y ago
Much to be said about the second half of your comment, enough that I'll leave it to the better educated. On the former, an article titled "the declining effect of CBT" was foundational to my disillusionment regarding new therapy techniques. Nothing is new under the sun, but fresh techniques often overperform in talk therapy studies. A long symbiotic relationship between providers and those in need have resulted in a blooming field, and metastudies generally show all talk therapies as slightly more effective than [only] drugs, and all drugs as [only!] slightly more effective than no intervention.
aftoprokrustes 3y ago
I am not of the field, bit did dig into the CBT hole (both reading and consulting a trained therapist), and I have the impression that the effects are overstated (and, at least for me, this was totally the wrong approach). The main issue I see with the studies I tried to look at was that they compared the answers to some psychometric scales between people following a CBT method and people following "talk therapy". My problem with it is that, while CBT is pretty formalized and can be "administered" in a not so terrible way even by an if-statement based chatbot [1], "talk therapy" is a very broad category, and the effects will be mostly dependent on not only the skill of the therapist, but also the fit between the therapist and the client. So yes, CBT will consistently give small results, but comparing it to consulting a random non-CBT therapist is as absurd as comparing the travel time by bus to the travel time by jumping in and out of random trains until you reach the destination. [1] before I get attacked on this: I do not say that there are no good therapists with CBT training - but I am confident most of them would still be very good even without the training or method.

raincole 3y ago

I don't even know whether I should read pop-science books any more. Or read anything any more. At one point the 10,000 hours rule was so popular that it almost became common sense. And it's bull. Ego depletion was so well known. And boom it's not replicable either. Is everything just food pyramid?

strangattractor 3y ago
I suppose but if someone actually practices something for 10K hours they are almost certainly going to be considerably better at it than people that do not even come close to that much practice. As they say in Pirates of the Caribbean - it's not a rule - think of them more as guidelines. I have always approached those types of books as opinion rather than fact. I think they are important for expanding ones views.
- raincole 3y ago
  I mean yes the more you pratice the better you get... but it's hardly worth a HN comment, let alone a whole book. Let alone multiple books. The real problem of the 10,000 hour rule is that it implis all the skills and professions are equally hard.
  - strangattractor 3y ago
    Agreed
ChainOfFools 3y ago
Everything is most likely just origami echoes of thermodynamics

LegitShady 3y ago

agree or not, the author is a great writer with some hilarious lines. "I am just bunch of bees!"

zug_zug 3y ago

Psychology is the study of the most complex machine in existence, a machine smart enough to do psychology. Of course it's really difficult to test it compared to simpler sciences. But if the author is trying to insinuate no meaningful progress in psychology was made in the last X years because of some twitter poll then that's doubtful -- scientists getting to the point they can scan neurons and reconstruct what you see through the activations. I do agree that you could generate endless reams of pseudo-data about the human behavior by labeling and classifying tiny patterns, and that that's not very practical. But that doesn't invalidate the rest. Perhaps one way to operationalize psychology would be to take a huge dataset, e.g. 1 million tinder profiles, and have a contest to identify the .1% that got married or something (and how long they stayed married for).

barrysteve 3y ago
The idea that you can read minds or reconstruct 'thought pictures', as if that's something everybody has, is going to require a lot of evidence. How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love. The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind. Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense. Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.

scrubs 3y ago

Great read

rPlayer6554 3y ago

My question after reading is, why aren't psychologists focusing their effort on real problems? Some of the "problems" the listed articles bring up seem vague and useless. I am not even vaguely familiar with this field, so I hesitate to assert any more than that. Other fields have useful problems they solve and that's were famous breakthroughs come from. Who cares if monkeys are paying for sex if people are killing themselves from depression? Are there not tons of psychological illnesses where progress could be made in new techniques to help people live their lives well? Maybe reduce the need for drugs?

owenversteeg 3y ago

Great summary of the field and very well written. Particularly: >The second formerly useful proto-paradigm is something like “situations matter.” This idea maintains that people's contexts have immense power over their behavior, and the strongest version maintains that the only difference between sinners and saints is their situations. The most famous psychology studies of all time are “situations matter” studies: the Milgram shock experiments, the Asch conformity studies, the bystander effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment (since revealed to be much more of a scripted play than a study). The now-much-ridiculed “social priming” studies, like the one where you unscramble words about being old and then walk more slowly, are also “situations matter” studies. So are “nudges,” where tiny changes in situations bring big changes in behavior, like redoing the layout of a cafeteria to encourage people to eat more veggies. Does anyone know any good situationist studies aside from the big names?

derbOac 3y ago

The irony of the piece is that psychology's greatest contribution to science over the last several decades is probably meta-science, or empirical introspection about the scientific process itself. Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere. The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around. What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come. Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science. Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.

esbeeb 3y ago

Silly question: why can't an AI be written which can read through all these piles of psychology papers, looking for various kinds of characteristics of fraudulent or sloppy scholarship, then summarizing its findings, assigning suggested reputation scores to various papers and authors?

spicymapotofu 3y ago
The line that separates good psych science from bad is more subtle than word choice or tone, and often researchers who primarily do good work may present work with faulty conclusions without anyone knowing better. It has taken decades for the replication crisis to take this shape, and maneuvering of data, subjects, and results toward outcomes that don't reproduce is systematic and subtle. I'm not suggesting AI couldn't find this distinction, but what remains after is the rigorous proving of the AI conclusion - which might take just as long as if AI wasn't involved.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Isn't marketing psychology? People will buy something with probability x% if you hammer it into their eyeballs N times. Looks like hard enough science. And one responsible for half of NASDAQ market cap :)

blastersyndrome 3y ago

Let me ask a simple question: What can be done about this, other than violence? I do not see a legal path going forward where all these corrupt individuals get removed from their positions of power. An eye for an eye.

em-bee 3y ago
play the long game and focus on better moral education. instead of just focusing on STEM schools need to teach children what is ethically good behavior. it won't eliminate the problem entirely, but it should reduce it drastically.