Skybird
07-26-23, 07:49 AM
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung speaks from the bottom of my heart. There are reasons why I never regretted, not for one day, to have given up psychology already very long time ago:
Bull**** research in the behavioral sciences.
Behavioral science straddles the border between economics and psychology and is proving vulnerable to fraud or unreproducible experiments.
Every now and then, even people working in science make headlines. However, not necessarily with new findings, but also through fraud.
The latest case concerns the previously hyped behavioral scientist and Harvard professor Francesca Gino. To her we owe the groundbreaking "insight" that people who have to write an essay on a topic that contradicts their beliefs are more likely to buy a soap afterwards.
The memory of the suppressed conviction, Gino argues, leads to a desire to purge oneself of that taint. Not only is this result testimony to scientifically inflated nonsense, but professional colleagues have since discovered that Gino falsified the results in this case as well as in other publications.
This fraud case is also interesting because Francesca Gino's specialty is to find out under which conditions people behave honestly. From her own dishonest behavior, we must conclude that the current scientific system does not encourage honest behavior.
Behavioral science in particular, which straddles the boundary between economics and psychology, is proving vulnerable to scientific fraud. Not only Francesca Gino, but also her colleague Dan Ariely, one of the best known and most cited behavioral scientists, has been suspected of falsification for quite some time.
Ironically, this concerns, among other works, a study on the subject of "honesty" from 2012, in which he and other authors "proved" the following: people who sign a form right at the beginning to assure that they are providing all the information truthfully behave more honestly than those who confirm the accuracy of the information only at the end of the form. Unfortunately, this result could never be replicated, because the researchers had apparently bent the data in such a way that their hypothesis was confirmed.
Now, one could dismiss these cases by saying that they are just a few black sheep, which are the exception and not the rule. But it is not that simple. It is no coincidence that the cases discovered now come from the field of behavioral science. There, experiments have increasingly become accepted as a scientific method. With their help, data are to be obtained which cannot be obtained by direct observation of human behavior in real life.
But this opened the door to a new bull**** research. Because with experiments it is easy to fabricate results, which researchers would like to have. This works for the following reasons:
First, experiments pretend an empirical exactness similar to that in the natural sciences. This overlooks the fact that in most cases scientific experiments can always be repeated under precisely controllable conditions. Only when a result is reproducible does it acquire the character of empirically produced evidence. In the social sciences, however, experiments are typically performed only once under specific conditions.
Second, experiments in social sciences are virtually never replicated by other researchers because this is expensive and uninteresting. The higher the cost of an experiment, the less likely it is that another researcher will perform the same experiment again. Renowned researchers can therefore use particularly expensive and elaborate experiments as a de facto safeguard against their result being falsified by another experiment under the same conditions. It generally brings much more prestige for a researcher to come up with a new experiment for a different hypothesis.
Third, experiments allow for arbitrary settings (referred to as refined research designs) that can be used to achieve desired outcomes. Hypothetical situations yield hypothetical results. So, virtually any hypothesis can be confirmed by a sophisticated experiment. And if the experiment does not produce the expected result, the setting is adjusted until the desired result does occur. Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually all experiments always produce what the researchers have previously formulated as a hypothesis.
Psychology in particular has thus degenerated into a mass program of arbitrary experiments. In 2015, a large-scale analysis led by psychologist Brian Nosek quantified the problem in an article in the journal "Science". The result: of 100 studies published in three psychology journals in 2008, only 39 could be confirmed.
In plain language, this means: You can simply forget about most of the research in psychology. It is true that in most cases there is no obvious cheating, as in the case of Francesca Gino. But you "experiment" around until you get the results you want. This is bull**** research.
-----------------
For those who are now interested in delving deeper into the reasons why psychology has so mercilessly pandered to mainstream political thinking and has provided a never-ending stream of arguments as to why the sociological worldview of politics - and today that means in practice: of the political left/woken/progressives - is so exceedingly "correct", I can recommend the book "Die Seele als Politikum. Psychologie und die Produktion des Individuums", published by Reimer Verlag in 1988 and probably only available as an antiquarian book.
The author shows that a deeply rooted inferiority complex underlies the Western psychology establishment. Since its foundation as an independent "science" in the 19th century, psychology wanted to show itself as equal to the crown of knowledge, physics, and it was believed that this could best be achieved by unconditionally trying to copy the methods and procedures of physics 1:1. This was perhaps still possible as far as the subject "physiology" with its relation to medicine and its points of contact with psychology were concerned, but psychology as such with its completely immaterial object of interest named the "psyche" could only suffer shipwreck at the dictate of the fact-heavy physics methodology. Or it could be fulfilled by removing the psyche from psychology and counting only empirically recorded reaction patterns, which would bring us to behaviorism. In our university studies, the professor once regaled us with a mathematical formula stretching over 8 pages of overhead transparencies, which was supposed to describe how the motivation arises in a person to lift a cup of coffee to his mouth and take a sip. This is BS! I have to admit that the professor in question was a critic of this nonsense and that he showed the formula only to demonstrate the extremes to which psychology went in the 50s and 60s.
In modern times, psychology discovered that it could cover up its far-reaching insubstantiality by joining forces with politics, and since then willingly delivered theories and "experimental results" that underpinned the leftist political mainstream and the collectivist striving with so-called "scientific facts", and thus rose to the rank of an omnipotent social authority without which nothing is possible anymore and which is asked about everything, although it has very little to offer that is substatinental and is its own. Not a bad career for someone whom I would certainly call an impostor today! The concept of the individual is diligently reinterpreted, and the individuality is redefined according to ideological political goals: the "individual" and the quality of "indiviodualism" is produced politically compliant according to party guidelines. Which of course destroys the individual quality in both, and is the goal of modern politics and left mainstream ideology.
At university I handed the book around a lot and recommended it. I do not have to emphasize it: I did not make many friends by doing so. Two professors in particular were no longer in good terms with me after that. The biggest benefit I have today from having studied psychology is my knowledge of statistics and scientific methodology, because of this the study in Germany, it was at least at that time, is full and full, an extremely statistics-heavy course. Most of the rest is BS with a gold glaze. Even worse it gets with sociology and pedagogics.
Bull**** research in the behavioral sciences.
Behavioral science straddles the border between economics and psychology and is proving vulnerable to fraud or unreproducible experiments.
Every now and then, even people working in science make headlines. However, not necessarily with new findings, but also through fraud.
The latest case concerns the previously hyped behavioral scientist and Harvard professor Francesca Gino. To her we owe the groundbreaking "insight" that people who have to write an essay on a topic that contradicts their beliefs are more likely to buy a soap afterwards.
The memory of the suppressed conviction, Gino argues, leads to a desire to purge oneself of that taint. Not only is this result testimony to scientifically inflated nonsense, but professional colleagues have since discovered that Gino falsified the results in this case as well as in other publications.
This fraud case is also interesting because Francesca Gino's specialty is to find out under which conditions people behave honestly. From her own dishonest behavior, we must conclude that the current scientific system does not encourage honest behavior.
Behavioral science in particular, which straddles the boundary between economics and psychology, is proving vulnerable to scientific fraud. Not only Francesca Gino, but also her colleague Dan Ariely, one of the best known and most cited behavioral scientists, has been suspected of falsification for quite some time.
Ironically, this concerns, among other works, a study on the subject of "honesty" from 2012, in which he and other authors "proved" the following: people who sign a form right at the beginning to assure that they are providing all the information truthfully behave more honestly than those who confirm the accuracy of the information only at the end of the form. Unfortunately, this result could never be replicated, because the researchers had apparently bent the data in such a way that their hypothesis was confirmed.
Now, one could dismiss these cases by saying that they are just a few black sheep, which are the exception and not the rule. But it is not that simple. It is no coincidence that the cases discovered now come from the field of behavioral science. There, experiments have increasingly become accepted as a scientific method. With their help, data are to be obtained which cannot be obtained by direct observation of human behavior in real life.
But this opened the door to a new bull**** research. Because with experiments it is easy to fabricate results, which researchers would like to have. This works for the following reasons:
First, experiments pretend an empirical exactness similar to that in the natural sciences. This overlooks the fact that in most cases scientific experiments can always be repeated under precisely controllable conditions. Only when a result is reproducible does it acquire the character of empirically produced evidence. In the social sciences, however, experiments are typically performed only once under specific conditions.
Second, experiments in social sciences are virtually never replicated by other researchers because this is expensive and uninteresting. The higher the cost of an experiment, the less likely it is that another researcher will perform the same experiment again. Renowned researchers can therefore use particularly expensive and elaborate experiments as a de facto safeguard against their result being falsified by another experiment under the same conditions. It generally brings much more prestige for a researcher to come up with a new experiment for a different hypothesis.
Third, experiments allow for arbitrary settings (referred to as refined research designs) that can be used to achieve desired outcomes. Hypothetical situations yield hypothetical results. So, virtually any hypothesis can be confirmed by a sophisticated experiment. And if the experiment does not produce the expected result, the setting is adjusted until the desired result does occur. Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually all experiments always produce what the researchers have previously formulated as a hypothesis.
Psychology in particular has thus degenerated into a mass program of arbitrary experiments. In 2015, a large-scale analysis led by psychologist Brian Nosek quantified the problem in an article in the journal "Science". The result: of 100 studies published in three psychology journals in 2008, only 39 could be confirmed.
In plain language, this means: You can simply forget about most of the research in psychology. It is true that in most cases there is no obvious cheating, as in the case of Francesca Gino. But you "experiment" around until you get the results you want. This is bull**** research.
-----------------
For those who are now interested in delving deeper into the reasons why psychology has so mercilessly pandered to mainstream political thinking and has provided a never-ending stream of arguments as to why the sociological worldview of politics - and today that means in practice: of the political left/woken/progressives - is so exceedingly "correct", I can recommend the book "Die Seele als Politikum. Psychologie und die Produktion des Individuums", published by Reimer Verlag in 1988 and probably only available as an antiquarian book.
The author shows that a deeply rooted inferiority complex underlies the Western psychology establishment. Since its foundation as an independent "science" in the 19th century, psychology wanted to show itself as equal to the crown of knowledge, physics, and it was believed that this could best be achieved by unconditionally trying to copy the methods and procedures of physics 1:1. This was perhaps still possible as far as the subject "physiology" with its relation to medicine and its points of contact with psychology were concerned, but psychology as such with its completely immaterial object of interest named the "psyche" could only suffer shipwreck at the dictate of the fact-heavy physics methodology. Or it could be fulfilled by removing the psyche from psychology and counting only empirically recorded reaction patterns, which would bring us to behaviorism. In our university studies, the professor once regaled us with a mathematical formula stretching over 8 pages of overhead transparencies, which was supposed to describe how the motivation arises in a person to lift a cup of coffee to his mouth and take a sip. This is BS! I have to admit that the professor in question was a critic of this nonsense and that he showed the formula only to demonstrate the extremes to which psychology went in the 50s and 60s.
In modern times, psychology discovered that it could cover up its far-reaching insubstantiality by joining forces with politics, and since then willingly delivered theories and "experimental results" that underpinned the leftist political mainstream and the collectivist striving with so-called "scientific facts", and thus rose to the rank of an omnipotent social authority without which nothing is possible anymore and which is asked about everything, although it has very little to offer that is substatinental and is its own. Not a bad career for someone whom I would certainly call an impostor today! The concept of the individual is diligently reinterpreted, and the individuality is redefined according to ideological political goals: the "individual" and the quality of "indiviodualism" is produced politically compliant according to party guidelines. Which of course destroys the individual quality in both, and is the goal of modern politics and left mainstream ideology.
At university I handed the book around a lot and recommended it. I do not have to emphasize it: I did not make many friends by doing so. Two professors in particular were no longer in good terms with me after that. The biggest benefit I have today from having studied psychology is my knowledge of statistics and scientific methodology, because of this the study in Germany, it was at least at that time, is full and full, an extremely statistics-heavy course. Most of the rest is BS with a gold glaze. Even worse it gets with sociology and pedagogics.