Truth be told, my criticism is particular in being directed against Freud but I'm using military tactics - liquidate high value targets. Attacking Freud successfully as I think I've done leaves psychology leaderless. Psychology should collapse unless psychology is the mythical Hydra. — TheMadFool
you're just ignorant about psychology as a discipline. — Ying
Name one geological, or ecological, or paleontological, or evolutionary biology theory that matches up to what you call a "scientific theory." — T Clark
You aren't "using military tactics - liquidate high value targets." As Ying noted:
you're just ignorant about psychology as a discipline.
— Ying — T Clark
Metascience
Metascience involves the application of scientific methodology to study science itself. The field of metascience has revealed problems in psychological research. Some psychological research has suffered from bias,[254] problematic reproducibility,[255] and misuse of statistics.[256] These findings have led to calls for reform from within and from outside the scientific community.[257]
Confirmation bias
In 1959, statistician Theodore Sterling examined the results of psychological studies and discovered that 97% of them supported their initial hypotheses, implying possible publication bias.[258][259][260] Similarly, Fanelli (2010)[261] found that 91.5% of psychiatry/psychology studies confirmed the effects they were looking for, and concluded that the odds of this happening (a positive result) was around five times higher than in fields such as space science or geosciences. Fanelli argued that this is because researchers in "softer" sciences have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases.
Replication
Further information: Replication crisis § In psychology
A replication crisis in psychology has emerged. Many notable findings in the field have not been replicated. Some researchers were even accused of publishing fraudulent results.[262][263][264] Systematic efforts, including efforts by the Reproducibility Project of the Center for Open Science, to assess the extent of the problem found that as many as two-thirds of highly publicized findings in psychology failed to be replicated.[265] Reproducibility has generally been stronger in cognitive psychology (in studies and journals) than social psychology[265] and subfields of differential psychology.[266][267] Other subfields of psychology have also been implicated in the replication crisis, including clinical psychology,[268][269] developmental psychology,[270][271][272] and a field closely related to psychology, educational research.[273][274][275][276]
Focus on the replication crisis has led to other renewed efforts in the discipline to re-test important findings.[277][278] In response to concerns about publication bias and data dredging (conducting a large number of statistical tests on a great many variables but restricting reporting to the results that were statistically significant), 295 psychology and medical journals have adopted result-blind peer review where studies are accepted not on the basis of their findings and after the studies are completed, but before the studies are conducted and upon the basis of the methodological rigor of their experimental designs and the theoretical justifications for their proposed statistical analysis before data collection or analysis is conducted.[279][280] In addition, large-scale collaborations among researchers working in multiple labs in different countries have taken place. The collaborators regularly make their data openly available for different researchers to assess.[281] Allen et al.[282] estimated that 61 percent of result-blind studies have yielded null results, in contrast to an estimated 5 to 20 percent in traditional research.
Misuse of statistics
Further information: Misuse of statistics and Misuse of p-values
Some critics view statistical hypothesis testing as misplaced. Psychologist and statistician Jacob Cohen wrote in 1994 that psychologists routinely confuse statistical significance with practical importance, enthusiastically reporting great certainty in unimportant facts.[283] Some psychologists have responded with an increased use of effect size statistics, rather than sole reliance on p-values.[284]
WEIRD bias
"WEIRD" redirects here. For other uses, see Weird.
See also: Cultural psychology, Indigenous psychology, Transnational psychology, and Cross-cultural psychology
In 2008, Arnett pointed out that most articles in American Psychological Association journals were about U.S. populations when U.S. citizens are only 5% of the world's population. He complained that psychologists had no basis for assuming psychological processes to be universal and generalizing research findings to the rest of the global population.[285] In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan reported a bias in conducting psychology studies with participants from "WEIRD" ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic") societies.[286][287] Henrich et al. found that "96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population" (p. 63). The article gave examples of results that differ significantly between people from WEIRD and tribal cultures, including the Müller-Lyer illusion. Arnett (2008), Altmaier, and Hall (2008) and Morgan-Consoli et al. (2018) view the Western bias in research and theory as a serious problem considering psychologists are increasingly applying psychological principles developed in WEIRD regions in their research, clinical work, and consultation with populations around the world.[285][288][289] In 2018, Rad, Martingano, and Ginges showed that nearly a decade after Henrich et al.'s paper, over 80% of the samples used in studies published in the journal Psychological Science employed WEIRD samples. Moreover, their analysis showed that several studies did not fully disclose the origin of their samples; the authors offered a set of recommendations to editors and reviewers to reduce WEIRD bias.[290]
Unscientific mental health training
Some observers perceive a gap between scientific theory and its application—in particular, the application of unsupported or unsound clinical practices.[291] Critics say there has been an increase in the number of mental health training programs that do not instill scientific competence.[292] Practices such as "facilitated communication for infantile autism"; memory-recovery techniques including body work; and other therapies, such as rebirthing and reparenting, may be dubious or even dangerous, despite their popularity.[293] These practices, however, are outside the mainstream practices taught in clinical psychology doctoral programs. — Wikipedia
Yeah, when psychologists say such things to people, this really helps to improve the reputation of psychology!!! — baker
I'm talking about what would justify the same great measure of legal power that they have. — baker
:100:A scientific theory needs to be falsifiable. If any of the branches of knowledge you mention contain such theories, they are scientific. If not, these aren't sciences. — TheMadFool
I'm not happy, not happy at all that I had to do your homework for you. — TheMadFool
from my side, I would say that what one can observe is behaviour and perhaps brain imagery with equipment, and these are not psyche. Psyche is inner; psyche is the immediacy, the presence that makes the present present.
— unenlightened
This is only what I would call awareness. Psyche, as far as Psychology is concerned is the entire set of functions carried out to derive behaviour from external stimuli (or internal ones, depending which school you follow). We take observations of external stimuli, observations of behaviour and then use models of psyche to make predictions about the relationship, test those predictions and refine the models accordingly. — Isaac
Also, many times, a person's problems aren't actually due to their faulty psychology, but due to external factors, like poverty or abuse by other people; situations where any sane person would eventually go crazy. But it doesn't seem to be in psychology's interest to acknowledge this. — baker
I'm not happy, not happy at all that I had to do your homework for you.
— TheMadFool
Maybe an antidepressant would help? — Bitter Crank
What you've written may provide a case that some psychology is bad science, but provides no evidence at all that psychology as a discipline is not a science. — T Clark
Are you saying functions of the mind that produce behaviour, but not strictly behaviour itself? If you are saying, as it seems, that psyche is something one theorises in others, not something one observes directly, then we are substantially in agreement. — unenlightened
my favourite psychological theory; it's Personal Construct Theory. — unenlightened
It at least acknowledges that the way one thinks about other people and of course oneself - ones psychological theory - is a major, crucial influence on one's behaviour. — unenlightened
That's what I do with psychologists! I poke them and watch them squirm. — unenlightened
The fact is that the term “science” simply has no very clear boundaries: the reference of the term is fuzzy, indeterminate and, not least, frequently contested. — Tom Storm
Now show how it is a science. — tim wood
What wild accusations?Instead of making wild accusations — Isaac
You're the one who wrote the above.Please, you're embarrassing yourself.... It's not fucking yellow either is it? Moron. — Isaac
But if you insist, then your burden is to demonstrate against what seems obvious, that areas of psychology are not science, and show them science. If psych. is to be all science, then all of it must be science. — tim wood
The thing about psychology (as opposed to other speculative enterprises like, say, evolutionary biology), is that one has to have a theory. We can't just postpone speculation until we've honed the method to a properly scientific one, we interact with other people all the time, we make decision which affect them. Every time we do this we do so on the basis of some theory about their psyche which dictates how we think they'll respond. So we can't do without psychology, we're all psychologists. It's just a question of whether we can do anything to even slightly improve the utility of our models. — Isaac
But if you insist, then your burden is to demonstrate against what seems obvious, that areas of psychology are not science, and show them science. If psych. is to be all science, then all of it must be science.
— tim wood
@Isaac - It's a lost cause. Tim will just go on redefining the question, moving the goal posts as they say. Now we don't have to show that psychology is a science in general. We have to show that every psychological study ever done is legitimate science. — T Clark
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