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Topic	Is psychology really a useless degree?
COVxy 12/27/18 2:17:55 PM #102:	Atralis posted... Its always been common knowledge in psychology that many prominent theories of the past have ended up being nonsense (Think Freud) Essentially Psychology resembles very little of what it looked like prior to the 1950's, as aside from the psychophysicist's of the late 1800's and the uprising of behaviorism in the early 1900's, it was back when psychology was much more like philosophy than anything else. Using anything prior as an example is kinda silly. It is true that formal theory is something that is lacking is psychology, in the same way it is lacking in biology. This is changing, but it's slow. This isn't to say that psychology is resting on poor legs. I have very little doubt in my mind that the large majority of core results in cognitive psychology will replicate every time. Hell, with most of these experiments, you can perform a single experiment on yourself and get pretty robust results (we did this in my cognitive psychology class in undergrad, 9/10 experiments I had data collected from myself that were robust in the same direction as the results from the literature). A visual search of a single feature will always be robustly faster than a visual search for a conjunction feature. Conjunction search will always scale with number of items while single feature search will not. In fact, if you look at the replication efforts, it's easy to predict what results will replicate and what won't. Psychologists predict this better than the public, but even the public is good at this. There's been a culture in science, and particularly within social psychology, to push flashy unexpected results. And it should be no surprise that if a scientific result surprises anyone it is unlikely to replicate. So a culture of biased publishing, selective reporting, and p-hacking descended upon social psychology in particular. But this isn't uniform across psychology, and it exists across all subdomains of science, more in some than others, but all fall prey to these biased incentives. --- =E[(x-E[x])(y-E[y])] <cite>COVxy posted [p:914782074] in Is psychol... [t:77334009]...</cite> <quote><cite>Atralis posted...</cite> <quote>Its always been common knowledge in psychology that many prominent theories of the past have ended up being nonsense (Think Freud)</quote> Essentially Psychology resembles very little of what it looked like prior to the 1950's, as aside from the psychophysicist's of the late 1800's and the uprising of behaviorism in the early 1900's, it was back when psychology was much more like philosophy than anything else. Using anything prior as an example is kinda silly. It is true that formal theory is something that is lacking is psychology, in the same way it is lacking in biology. This is changing, but it's slow. This isn't to say that psychology is resting on poor legs. I have very little doubt in my mind that the large majority of core results in cognitive psychology will replicate every time. Hell, with most of these experiments, you can perform a single experiment on yourself and get pretty robust results (we did this in my cognitive psychology class in undergrad, 9/10 experiments I had data collected from myself that were robust in the same direction as the results from the literature). A visual search of a single feature will always be robustly faster than a visual search for a conjunction feature. Conjunction search will always scale with number of items while single feature search will not. In fact, if you look at the replication efforts, it's easy to predict what results will replicate and what won't. Psychologists predict this better than the public, but even the public is good at this. There's been a culture in science, and particularly within social psychology, to push flashy unexpected results. And it should be no surprise that if a scientific result surprises anyone it is unlikely to replicate. So a culture of biased publishing, selective reporting, and p-hacking descended upon social psychology in particular. But this isn't uniform across psychology, and it exists across all subdomains of science, more in some than others, but all fall prey to these biased incentives. --- =E[(x-E[x])(y-E[y])]</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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