As someone who has written his thesis in social psychology i have to say that social psychology is fundamentally broken, kaput. If you had a worker who fixed th

As someone who has written his thesis in social psychology i have to say that social psychology is fundamentally broken, kaput. If you had a worker who fixed the pipes in your apartment the same way your toilet and kitchen would explode. But because we call social psychology a science we accept it somehow and hope for progress. Issues i have: 1.) What would the practical consequences be if social psychology and it's knowledge would be erased. Not many that i can think of. Considering that the area has immense potential applications this is pretty telling. 2.) What have been the most important research breakthroughs of the last 20-30 years? There are new fads for sure (behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary psych i look at you) but they all coexist peacefully. No falsification is happening, just new profs need new theories for publication. 3.) There is NO theoretical rigor. If you do have tons of theories you would suppose that there is much theoretic work going on clarifying and contrasting this theories to enable empirical tests of their validity. Not here. The more theories the merrier. Why? Every researcher needs his own theory or not crowded field so he doesn't rock the boat. That has lead to the development that one experiment is done by two grad students and a significant result in one direction is interpreted by one theory and in the other direction by another theory. Basically you give a sample of students a questionnaire and if it goes one way it proves that XY gave an evolutionary advantage to the prehistoric people if it went the other way it proves that the utility curves cringle on the right side. Both ways the researcher has something to publish. I do think that the 2 theories per experiment limitation is rather arbitrary and inefficient tough. There is definite room for improvement here. 4.) Many recent work try to address this by going theory free. All this different effects are the result. This is also practical because there is always room for more effects to research and if you happen to need one to explain a particular fact then there are always a ton to choose from. 5.) Cargo cult use of statistics. You could make an argument that most social science researchers are not able to understand the whys and hows of statistics and decision theory so giving them recipes to follow is better than the alternative. Might be. It just does not work. It really does not. Also the imperative of the researcher is not to generate knowledge but publishable significant results. Basically i do think that we have to start over and scrap the work done so far. And no, i do not have a better alternative at hand. That is not necessary to see that the current process is broken and produces nothing useful and binds intellectual potential, tough.