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Another take: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psych... > So what
by DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
Another take:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psych...
> So what was the scientific fallout of Stapel's demise? What theories had to be rewritten? What revisions did we have to make to our understanding of the human mind?
> Basically none, as far as I can tell. The universities where Stapel worked released a long report cataloging all of his misdeeds, and the part called “Impact of the fraud” (section 3.7 if you're following along at home) details all sorts of reputational harm: students, schools, co-authors, journals, and even psychology itself all suffer from their association with Stapel. It says nothing about the scientific impact—the theories that have to be rolled back, the models that have to be retired, the subfields that are at square one again. And looking over Stapel's retracted work, it's because there are no theories, models, or subfields that changed much at all. The 10,000+ citations of his work now point nowhere, and it makes no difference.
> As a young psychologist, this chills me to my bones. Apparently is possible to reach the stratosphere of scientific achievement, to publish over and over again in “high impact” journals, to rack up tens of thousands of citations, and for none of it to matter. Every marker of success, the things that are supposed to tell you that you're on the right track, that you're making a real contribution to science—they might mean nothing at all. So, uh, what exactly am I doing?
It's kinda like finding out an athlete has been cheating. You probably want to throw away any of their inspirational talk, but it doesn't affect the rest of your life because it was just a sport to begin with. Somebody was gonna win, somebody was gonna lose, and it matters a whole lot to the players (and fans) but that's it. Except worthwhile science is supposed to actually matter whether it's true or false.
- norwalkbear 3y agoPeople are right to distrust the institutions
- sealeck 3y agoNice to add a very vague statement here.
- RandomLensman 3y agoMost research is kind of irrelevant outside of research which is why one can get away with dishonesty as no-one places big financial bets on the findings being correct.
- nequo 3y agoBut the point is that the retracted research is irrelevant even inside research. That is kind of a blow. It points to the discipline not being coherently built on shared theories but rather being a set of disjointed hypotheses.
- RandomLensman 3y agoA lot research is even irrelevant to the broader research community (beyond the specific researcher and perhaps the associated teams) - nothing new, I fear.
- ssivark 3y agoBut if that’s the kind of research that racks up tens of thousands of citations, does that mean all the researchers in the field are simply LARPing?
- RandomLensman 3y agoDoubt it. I cannot speak to that field, but references/citations can have their own dynamics and life. As the OP pointed to the limited consequences of the papers being retracted, the citations could be just "expected" nods to certain things in papers.
- kelipso 3y agoYeah citations can be as simple as "this concept was mentioned in this paper first".
- civilitty 3y ago
- Roark66 3y agoAnd that is why I don't consider psychology as a whole a science. It simply isn't. Imagine if something like this happened in physics, or mathematics. It would have huge impacts on all work that cited it. In psychology, not so much. Does this mean psychology is useless? I don't think so, there have been many people helped by application of psychology, but the sooner we take it out of the same category as for example mathematics or medicine the sooner we can move on. I'd love to be convinced otherwise that we as humanity have a chance of understanding ourselves to the point where we can draw meaningful conclusions about human happiness or other feelings/states of mind. However, I think at this stage our chance of accomplishing this is similar to a medieval blacksmith doing a successful root canal treatment on of his dental patients. I'm definitely looking at the advancements in AI with hope that perhaps replicating our own thought processes in machines will enable us to study them more systematically and to understand them, but these are still early days.
- bakuninsbart 3y agoIt already is in a completely different category than mathematics; mathematics is a humanity while psychology is a science. Do the standards need to be improved in psychology? Almost certainly, and this rings true for most quantitative social sciences. But research should be evaluated on its own, not by field. There is still a lot of good, solid knowledge being produced through the scientific methods in these fields. We just generally lack the unifying theories we know from eg. physics, because the subject matter is so much more complicated, and the field is much younger. And in a lot of ways, the way academia works is not conductive to producing high-quality, impactful research in these fields.
- whimsicalism 3y agoMathematics is not a humanities, it is a formal science, unless you are using some very idiosyncratic definition.
- beojan 3y agoMathematics isn't a humanity but it isn't a science either. It's purer than a science, demanding logical proof, not just evidence.
- ssivark 3y agoOof, that article is brilliant. Seldom do I see such an honest perspective, with penetrating insight into the essence* of the matter.
- bhk 3y ago> The 10,000+ citations of his work now point nowhere, and it makes no difference. One has to wonder about the practice of citation in modern academia, when not one in 10,000+ is consequential.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 3y agoIn the case of Ariely, it seems that some of the institutions who tried to follow his recommendations found the recommendations ineffective. So in this case practical harm was already done in the form of wasted time and effort.