When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?

[Belacqua]

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.

This looks good! Just reading the summaries, I think the concept is more useful in some ways than the group-oriented vs. individual-oriented thing I was talking about. 

What I was thinking about in Japan was that in certain kinds of prescribed areas, eccentricity or individuality is accepted very easily. Maybe we can say it's a tight society, with pockets of looseness. The overall tightness means that how people respond to oddballs is also restricted, which makes them more secure. 

So for example the gay subculture in Tokyo was tolerated and safe for a long time, more than in the US. I've read memoirs from gay Americans and Europeans who came to Japan with the post-war occupation, and decided to stay when they discovered that as long as they stayed within certain well-known boundaries, they were freer than back home. Like you wouldn't come out to your boss at Mitsubishi, but you also wouldn't have any fear of getting beaten up or arrested on the street where the gay bars are. 

In my city bullying is a problem in junior high schools, but there's also a middle-aged man who wears miniskirts all over town, whom I see at my supermarket once in a while. He smiles and enjoys the stares, and nobody gives him any trouble. So the boundaries about conformism seem clear. 

I also think that in America much of the image of freedom and individuality is play-acting. Like the old joke about how everybody in the world wears blue jeans to show that they're nonconformist. A large set of the rugged individualists use the same set of social symbols (motorcycle, pickup truck, gun collection, goatee) to show that they are individualists. It is a tight culture with strict rules as to how you pretend it's loose. Individualists who individualized outside the dress code would be in danger in a lot of the country. (Maybe not Brooklyn.)

I should read that book.

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.

I didn't know this. This is good to learn. 

I had assumed that more always meant better, but maybe not. 

And the WEIRD idea makes sense. Of course Freud was criticized in this way, too. The things he took to be universal rules, other people say, may only have applied to well-off Viennese ladies in 1910 Vienna. But as long as the methodology makes clear who the subjects were and, as you say, one is careful about generalizing, it doesn't invalidate results. 

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.

This absolutely sounds like real science to me, with all the care and attention necessary. The critique class sounds very valuable. 

I suppose that "science" gets idealized a lot, to the point where people might imagine it's all like the purest clockmaking. I'm glad that the people doing the science are wiser about that. 

Are you involved in any research of this type? Probably you don't want to be too specific in public here, but I'm curious if this is part of your grad school so far.