Replication Crisis

Mid century 20th psychology is about the psychology of cool ideas. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo ended up in every Psych 101 textbook, even after the evidence for their famous studies started to erode (and eventually collapsed). That's why social psychology especially is having a replication crisis - because they did a lot of poorly designed experiments to try and illustrate various points that people thought were true because they hoped were true. After WWII people were fascinated by the question of what would cause otherwise decent people to do evil things.  It was an era that believed more and more that environment could make you do anything, so "experiments" were designed not to study that - certainly not to research that, but to illustrate those ideas. 

If that sounds like something that is more artistic expression than it is science, well, yeah. Exactly. People in those fields who wanted to do actual science existed, and a much greater percentage exists now. But no one did New Yorker articles on them, no one talked about them in college bull sessions, no one referenced them from lecterns (and pulpits!) to make their own favored points. We still see it with such nonsense as such as priming, which is a follow on from the Hidden Persuaders school of belief who is worried that "they" can make you do just about anything. One of my favorite rants i, mentioned just a few posts ago, is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relatively, that we think in different ways because we grew up with a different language. It just sounds like it would be cool if it were true.

I wish I could track down the quote but have come up empty.  Maybe I thought of it myself and attributed to some senior psychologist complaining about the banal state of experimentation these days.*"You can't just put the horses out on the track and let them run anymore," meaning you could no longer think up creative experiments with far-reaching implications as much. Well, but that's the point. Are these horses representative of horses in general? Is this race a good measurement of horse abilities in general or only of particular types of horses? Does the horse behavior come naturally out of what horses are or is it imposed by trainers and jockeys? Is it different if there's a crowd? These are the things we actually want to know if we are scientists. Though admittedly it IS much more fun to watch a horse race and maybe even put down a bet on it.   

Consider Margaret Mead's Coming of Age In Samoa, described as "a proponent of broadening sexual conventions." Well fine.  Just do that on your own time without calling it science, wouldja? Or the top thinkers in psychology and sociology from their earliest decades, the Freuds, Jungs, Skinners, Webers and Durkheims  Remember my discussion of Art from Goethe's Three Questions, one of my most-visited posts in 20 years.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed that Three Questions be asked about any work of art. They must be answered in order.

1. What was the artist trying to do?

2. How well did he do it?

3. Was it worth the doing?

We wanted them to do science. They wanted to put ideas they thought were true forward, and tried to squeeze that into the form dominant and the time. Everyone considered science-y things as the most intellectual. Not necessarily rel science, though that was nice, too. They were artists masquerading as scientists. It doesn't make them wrong.  But for things like replication and advancement of knowledge rather than theorising, it doesn't cut the mustard.

Science fiction is very cool. In many ways it's more fun than actual science. And it often can tell us something about human behavior or technical possibilities. But ultimately, it's literature, not science, even if it is greatly influenced by real science, as with Isaac Asimov.

*Because it would be really cool if some senior psychologist agreed with me, you know?