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Is psychology vague? Pyschologycels :marseycope: :marseyseethe: about the Replication Crisis

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/1dhv4ll/is_psychology_a_vague_subject_and_hard_to/

								

								

It's less vague than sociology

Even psychologycels dunk on sociologycels :#marseydunkon:

Psychology is actually an extremely rigorous science, it's usually often more specific and rigorous than other fields of research because we're measuring intangible things such as personality traits and feelings and our subjects are real people. This means we have to consistently go above and beyond to prove things and take into consideration ethics at every step in the study design process.

"Rigorous" is a charitable term when replicability rates in social psychology are roughly 20-30% and in cognitive psychology are approach 50%

I also question the premise whether there is some more methodological rigor because of studying intangible things. That may be the case for those who study measurement and psychometrics, like personality psychologists. But there are an astounding number of psychology papers using unreliable and non valid measures to study intangible constructs which is part of the replicability crisis: the field is not more rigorous by virtue of studying something complex if it often doesn't do it well and many don't care about valid measurement

I'm very skeptical that this is a psychology problem, rather than a "science is hard" problem. To my knowledge very few fields have undertaken reproducibility studies to the extent that psychology has (but if I'm mistaken very happy to be proven otherwise!). So just because replication rates look bad for psychology doesn't mean it is less rigorous than other sciences.

Once example I'm aware of: A replicability project for cancer biology replicated 40% of the original effects https://www.cos.io/rpcb

!ifrickinglovescience !physics !biology how's the Replication Crisis affecting you guys?

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/1clwb0d/is_there_a_replication_crisis_still_2023_and_2024/

The replication "crisis" is part of the nature of statistical testing. Read "the nature of p." All branches of science have a replication "crisis" and medicine was once of the first to angst over it, not psych.

Do you have an author or link for "the nature of p"?

Not off the top of my head, but this touches on the same issues. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-018-0421-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2698

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html

The basic idea is that a failure to reproduce doesn't mean the theory is wrong, and reproduction doesn't mean it is right. It just changes our perception of the strength of the effect and should motivate us to consider the likelihood that the effect is influenced by unexplored boundary conditions or moderators. We have learned so much and are able to do so many more things these days. Seems odd to say the field is in a crisis. It is like watching a bmw owner drive his car to the junk yard because the engine's timing is off and demand they crush it into a cube.

:#pepemath: :#marseymath:

95
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i've written my thesis in a social science and the way it works you come up with your conclusion and then work your way backwards towards it

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Why is this allowed? Last time I checked they teach against confirmation bias in high school. But when you get to higher education it becomes the norm and is never challenged?

:marseydeadinside:

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A lot of r-sluration in higher ed can be placed on the emphasis on writing your thesis on an 'original idea.'

So instead of something sensible, like writing your thesis on a detailed analysis of a complex subject to demonstrate mastery, people work overtime finding an obscure angle to tackle an even more obscure issue. To do this you, well, have to work backwards.

Step one: Come up with an 'original thesis.'

Step two: Confront the fact nobody has done the thesis before not because you're a genius, but because it's probably wrong

Step three: Figure out how to aggressively bullshit and work backwards so your thesis can still turn out appearing like it had merit. Write simple ideas in the most convoluted way possible to avoid scrutiny and remind the higher ups you're part of the club (and that failing you would be rude).

Step four: Stare at it all for so long that you eventually convince yourself your own bs actually has merit (it does not) and teach it to undergrads

Step five: Graduate and turn further exploration of your bs into two books and forty articles. Your idiocy is now 'known fact.' It is still idiocy and can never be replicated.

Congrats, now you know how academia works and why it's so r-slurred.

Edit: It's also how you can end up with professors who are only really knowledgeable in niche areas of their subject, and seem to work every single class around (blank) theory—because it's all they've studied in sincere depth.

And, it's also why idiotic new trends take hold so deeply and so fast in academia. A new theory that provides a new angle to write papers on will be jumped on hard whether or not it's stupid, simply because it's novel and can provide previously unwritten thesis topics.

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This is a really long way of saying you don't frick.

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Just because they teach it in school doesn't mean people will agree. That's especially true in a field full of foids who don't understand the scientific process at all and just want to confirm their headcanon.

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The people who understand the scientific process the least are STEMcels

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Because "I went and researched X and it was super boring and nothing came from it" is not a great paper.

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because if we don't prove our conclusions with science then fascism wins.

jewish lives matter btw

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When u was in school their seemed to be a schism occuring in the field between the appropriateness or using qualitative vs quantitative methods in the humanities and social sciences. But i had professors telling rooms full of students to never trust quantitative research i this field. The stats are going to be useless or manipulated to prove a thesis, much like you are saying. Work backwards

At least with qualitative studies, you can say these specific people at this specific time believe or do this specific thing. Its subject to change, we offer a snapshot of reality. We aren't seeking truths, just an understanding of this moment.

I've also read papers from professors who clearly cooked their numbers, or tried to handwave their weak correlations as no big deal, and were actually totes proving their point, when they were doing the opposite.

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