RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 17, 2021 at 12:12 am
(This post was last modified: May 17, 2021 at 12:50 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(May 16, 2021 at 10:56 pm)Belacqua Wrote: 1) It is an extremely strong cultural cliche -- a received idea -- that Americans are individualists and Japanese are group-oriented. My experience has been that this is true in some ways and not in others. In some situations the pressure to conform is stronger in America than it is here. So I read carefully to see if the researchers had built this assumption into the methodology.
I recently began reading a book about "tight" and "loose" cultures (groups that have strong or weak norms). I wonder if this framework helps make sense of your observations. For example, the book shows that states within the U.S differ in their tightness. Tightness also differs by location: libraries are tight, but parks are loose. And activities: funerals might be tight and weddings might be loose. So perhaps the situations you have in mind are differing on this front.
Quote:2) As always, the number of test subjects is small, and they are all university students. So that's a limitation.
Yes, there's a few things I could mention here. First, you're right about the group demographics. There's an acronym in psychology called WEIRD, which stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. It sums up the kinds of undergraduates that are often used in studies. It wouldn't invalidate the study necessarily, but it does affect its generalizability. And secondly, the sample size is probably fine. They used around 40 participants on average. There is this unofficial (and often critiqued) rule that a sample size of 30 is the magic number. The number is obviously inaccurate, and there's ways of calculating the right number (which I assume the researchers did). But 30 is a good anchor to know because people tend to overestimate the number of participants thats needed.
That said, I do want to add something important—this is what we do in my graduate classes. Every week we are assigned one or two research papers, and we spend about three hours discussing and critiquing them in class. We talk about what the study did wrong or right, or could have done better (including all the critiques you mentioned). Science is a conversation, and in my classes we are learning to have that conversation. But its clear to me that being scientific and being right are not synonymous. Everyone is still "doing science" even when improvements could be made.
