RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 13, 2021 at 7:37 am
(This post was last modified: May 13, 2021 at 7:37 am by Belacqua.)
I agree that there are cases in which psychology studies are conducted in a pseudo-scientific manner. In fact I think this is largely caused by people who believe in scientism, as you seem to -- they think that a thing has to be scientific to be meaningful, so they shoehorn it into a scientific shape where it doesn't belong.
There was a study a few years ago that got a lot of attention among atheists on forums like this one. It purported to show that religious people were more likely to take nonsense statements seriously than atheists were. But the design of the study was wildly biased. It was hilarious, really.
The test consisted of a series of statements and the subjects judged whether the statements were nonsense or not. The researchers had decided in advance which sentences were meaningful. Naturally, the ones they pre-approved as meaningful were the ones which accorded with their own ideology and view of the world. They thought they were testing how people reacted to nonsense, but they were really testing which people agreed with their ideology.
They should have stopped pretending to be scientists long enough to read Derrida. It just isn't possible to decide in advance whether a sentence is meaningful or not -- the meaning is created in the mind of the reader. A sentence which seems like gibberish to one person will spark associations and meaningful responses in someone else.
So the attempt to be scientific may lead to poor research, when what's being tested isn't really scientifically quantifiable.
This, combined with the reproducibility crisis in all of science these days, makes psychology particularly problematic.
There was a study a few years ago that got a lot of attention among atheists on forums like this one. It purported to show that religious people were more likely to take nonsense statements seriously than atheists were. But the design of the study was wildly biased. It was hilarious, really.
The test consisted of a series of statements and the subjects judged whether the statements were nonsense or not. The researchers had decided in advance which sentences were meaningful. Naturally, the ones they pre-approved as meaningful were the ones which accorded with their own ideology and view of the world. They thought they were testing how people reacted to nonsense, but they were really testing which people agreed with their ideology.
They should have stopped pretending to be scientists long enough to read Derrida. It just isn't possible to decide in advance whether a sentence is meaningful or not -- the meaning is created in the mind of the reader. A sentence which seems like gibberish to one person will spark associations and meaningful responses in someone else.
So the attempt to be scientific may lead to poor research, when what's being tested isn't really scientifically quantifiable.
This, combined with the reproducibility crisis in all of science these days, makes psychology particularly problematic.