Crisis in Psychology?

[John 6IX Breezy]

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@John 6IX Breezy

What's your opinion on this? (Since it's in your field of study....?)

Well here's a question I've wondered about. What is the right conclusion to make once a study doesn't replicate?

Most people, I think, conclude that the first study is flawed and throws everything out. But I can't help but feel there is a temporal or sequential bias there. Would we be inclined to make the same conclusion if the studies came out in reverse order, for example? Meaning, if the study that didn't find any effect came first, and the one that found an effect came after? And then there is perhaps another option, which is to treat both studies as equally valid, as if they came out simultaneously, and then take some average of the two, no different from a meta-analysis. (In fact, I think this is what we would do if both studies came out positive.)

So, it's not immediately clear to me what our response to replication ought to be. And I should add that I think the root of the replication problem is statistics. You find similar issues everywhere that statistics is used, for example, fMRI research. This is particularly interesting because psychology is dominated by statistics, but it wasn't always the case. In fact, I think giants like BF Skinner who witnessed the emergence of statistics saw it as something corrupting the field. He thought our focus should primarily be on the individual, and statistics erases the individual.

ps. The following quote is from my undergrad statistics textbook:

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"Behaviorism’s most famous advocate, B. F. Skinner, was quite opposed to statistics. Skinner even said, “I would much rather see a graduate student in psychology taking a course in physical chemistry than in statistics. And I would include [before statistics] other sciences, even poetry, music, and art."

Skinner was constantly pointing to the information lost by averaging the results of a number of cases. For instance, Skinner (1956) cited the example of three overeating mice—one naturally obese, one poisoned with gold, and one whose hypothalamus had been altered. Each had a different curve for learning to press a bar for food. If these learning curves had been merged statistically, the result would have represented no actual eating habits of any real mouse. As Skinner said, “These three individual curves contain more information than could probably ever be generated with measures requiring statistical treatment, yet they will be viewed with suspicion by many psychologists because they are single cases” (p. 232).

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