When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?

[Ranjr]

Not more current.  That's your misunderstanding.  I brought up Skinner, as an example of psychologists who "make testable predictions"

Here is what you said:

Classical and operant conditioning make testable predictions.  Too many here are focused on early theorists while ignoring Skinner and the like.

It contrasts "early theorists" with "Skinner and the like." 

Thank you for clarifying that you intended to emphasize testability and not earliness. In 2021, Skinner appears to be an early theorist who attempted testability.

The link between conditioning, testability and Skinner needed no clarification.  The link to early gave that emphasis.  You're welcome.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Psychology still seems to be at the level of alchemy: there is a lot of interesting data being collected, but there is also a lot of hokum and nonsense. There is a hope it will actually evolve into a science (as alchemy did to chemistry), but that is going to take a LOT more work.

Here is the latest issue from the annual review of psychology: Volume 72, 2021 | Annual Review of Psychology 

Based on the titles and their abstracts, could you point out which article seems like alchemy to you? The first one "Active forgetting: Adaptation of memory by prefrontal control" is open access if you want to skim through it and make any comments.

[Belacqua]

The link between conditioning, testability and Skinner needed no clarification.

Certainly you could put together a philosophical argument to try to persuade us that testability makes psychology better. The normal characteristics of science -- testability, quantifiability, repeatability, etc. -- may or may not be important for psychological projects. We'd have to have reasons to believe that, and the reasons would need to be backed up.

I am sure that for certain projects done by psychologists, these things are appropriate. For example, if a factory owner hired a psychologist to increase the workers' output and reduce sick days, the tests and measures would demonstrate success of failure. 

The worry I have is that this plugs psychology into an ideology that serves capitalism. And I have no reason to believe that the fundamental questions of psychology -- how we feel what we feel, what makes us happy or sad -- has any relation to such an ideology. I suspect that the farther our psychological therapies distance themselves from such an ideology the greater their results will be -- in a human, not a business sense. 

Since most science is funded with a goal, it is almost always provided from the beginning with ideological assumptions. A lively productive life is good. A contemplative life of withdrawal is bad. Happiness is achieved in certain societally-determined ways, etc. The danger is that what testable psychology tests is adherence to these pre-determined goals, whether they are best for the individual or not. 

Freudian talk therapy is in no way testable or quantifiable. There is no way to prove, even if you've done it for a few years, that it was a useful expenditure of money. You may be sad when you finish it. Nonetheless, it still may be a very valuable way to spend one's time.

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Psychology still seems to be at the level of alchemy: there is a lot of interesting data being collected, but there is also a lot of hokum and nonsense. There is a hope it will actually evolve into a science (as alchemy did to chemistry), but that is going to take a LOT more work.

Here is the latest issue from the annual review of psychology: Volume 72, 2021 | Annual Review of Psychology 

Based on the titles and their abstracts, could you point out which article seems like alchemy to you? The first article "Active Forgetting: Adaptation of Memory by Prefrontal Control" is open access if you want to skim through it and make any comments.

Forgive me for replying to something you've deleted -- I thought it was interesting. 

I agree that Freud is an outlier in many ways and certainly not the beginning. In William James' Varieties of Religious Experience there's a page where he lists some younger people in Europe who are doing promising work, and there is Freud's name in among a list of others who are almost entirely unknown today. He stands out to us, but to James he was one of many. 

I have a book on my shelf here called Plato's Psychology. And it's pretty clear that Plato was reacting to Heraclitus and Parmenides. So they'd win the prize for earliness, I'm pretty sure. Plotinus seems to be the first person to suggest that people have a part of their minds of which they are not conscious -- later called a subconscious. 

Though we may prefer the more recent guys, I think it's a mistake to rule somebody out just because he was early. There are still enormous benefits in reading them.

[Nay_Sayer]

science can have a variety of definitions.   Not all definition implied by accepted usage also imply the involvement of the rigor associated with the physical sciences.

Physics is a scientific belief and is based on truth, which is religion.

.......What?!  My man, put the pipe down

[John 6IX Breezy]

I have a book on my shelf here called Plato's Psychology. And it's pretty clear that Plato was reacting to Heraclitus and Parmenides. So they'd win the prize for earliness, I'm pretty sure. Plotinus seems to be the first person to suggest that people have a part of their minds of which they are not conscious -- later called a subconscious. 

When I did my undergraduates a few years ago, we were required to take a course called History and Systems in Psychology. The entire first half of the course, which I thought would begin with Freud, was a history in the philosophy of mind. I didn't value it at the time, but the impression the course left was that there was a clear passing of the baton from philosophy to science in the study of mind. Descartes, John Locke, Berkeley, and almost every major thinker in history has addressed the mind question. Galileo himself divided reality into what he called primary and secondary qualities, which is something like the sensation/perception distinction.

[Belacqua]

I have a book on my shelf here called Plato's Psychology. And it's pretty clear that Plato was reacting to Heraclitus and Parmenides. So they'd win the prize for earliness, I'm pretty sure. Plotinus seems to be the first person to suggest that people have a part of their minds of which they are not conscious -- later called a subconscious. 

When I did my undergraduates a few years ago, we were required to take a course called History and Systems in Psychology. The entire first half of the course, which I thought would begin with Freud, was a history in the philosophy of mind. I didn't value it at the time, but the impression the course left was that there was a clear passing of the baton from philosophy to science in the study of mind. Descartes, John Locke, Berkeley, and almost every major thinker in history has addressed the mind question. Galileo himself divided reality into what he called primary and secondary qualities, which is something like the sensation/perception distinction.

This sounds like a brilliant course. Not immediately applicable, maybe, but any new and way-out idea that might pop up in psychology would almost certainly be more comprehensible with this class under your belt. 

My nephew got a degree in psych recently from a fairly big-shot university, and talking to him it's clear that he never had a class like this. Nor did he have to read any Freud or Jung. I'm not sure where they started, but it was very much based on whatever practical treatments are considered best these days. Career training, really, not theoretical at all.

You know way more about the field than I do, but it seems to me that science and philosophy will have to continue in dialectic on theories of mind, for the time being at least.

[polymath257]

Psychology still seems to be at the level of alchemy: there is a lot of interesting data being collected, but there is also a lot of hokum and nonsense. There is a hope it will actually evolve into a science (as alchemy did to chemistry), but that is going to take a LOT more work.

Here is the latest issue from the annual review of psychology: Volume 72, 2021 | Annual Review of Psychology 

Based on the titles and their abstracts, could you point out which article seems like alchemy to you? The first one "Active forgetting: Adaptation of memory by prefrontal control" is open access if you want to skim through it and make any comments.

"Tade-offs in Choice' and 'The Cultural Foundation of Human Memory', and 'The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation' are the most likely candidates based on the abstracts. The one you mention seems to be the least alchemic.

[The Grand Nudger]

Here's the conclusion of that review on human cooperation -

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We began by introducing five key features of human cooperation that challenge any evolutionary
account. To address these, we presented an extended evolutionary synthesis, which considers both
genetic and cultural evolution as well as their interaction, and evaluated leading hypotheses in light
of the available evidence. Now, let’s return to our opening challenges.
(1) Ultrasociality: Genetic evolutionary mechanisms, such as kin-based altruism and direct
reciprocity, may be adequate to explain cooperation in other animals; but, to tackle human
ultrasociality requires understanding our second system of inheritance—culture—and the
ways that it has altered our psychology, suppressed our reactive aggression, enhanced our
capacity for internalizing norms and driven our genetic evolution in several ways. Culture is
what has domesticated our species.
(2) Differences in the domains of cooperation: The domains of cooperation vary across
societies because, at least in part, social norms vary (e.g., for raiding, food sharing, etc.). If a
population has no social norms prescribing recycling, tithing, or tipping, people don’t
generally engage in such costly behaviors.
(3) Differences in the scale and intensity of cooperation across populations: The scale and
intensity of human cooperation varies dramatically across societies because it’s heavily
influenced by cultural evolution, driven by the effect of intergroup competition on
institutions. The intensity of intergroup competition has varied dramatically across
populations for a variety of ecological, climatic, geographic and historical reasons (Turchin
2015). This competition has selected for more prosocial norms and institutions and in some
cases, such as the Catholic Church’s weakening of kin-bonds (Schulz et al. 2019), operated
by undermining the effectiveness of lower-scale mechanisms.
(4) Rapid rise in the scale of cooperation: Beginning about 12,000 years ago, the origins of
intensive food production and the stabilization of global climates dramatically increased the
intensity of intergroup competition and began driving cultural evolution to scale up
cooperation (Turchin 2015). This process continues to this day.
(5) Non-cooperative and maladaptive behaviors sustained by the same mechanisms as
cooperation: Because cultural evolutionary mechanisms related to punishment, signaling
and reputation can stabilize any costly norm, even norms that are costly for both the
individual and group (e.g., female infibulation), non-cooperative and maladaptive behavior
can persist for long periods. Intergroup competition provides a process that filters out
group-damaging norms, but it can be slow and incomplete, especially when many such
norms are tightly intertwined with other important cooperative norms

Understanding the origins and psychology of human cooperation is an exciting and rapidly
developing enterprise. Those interested in engaging with this grand question should consider three
elements of this endeavor: (1) theoretical frameworks, (2) diverse methods, and (3) history. To the
first, the extended evolutionary framework we described comes with a rich body of theories and
hypotheses as well as tools for developing new theories, about both human nature and cultural
psychology. We encourage psychologists to take the formal theory seriously and learn to read the
primary literature (McElreath & Boyd 2007). Second, the nature of human cooperation demands
cross-cultural, comparative and developmental approaches that integrate experiments, observation,
and ethnography. Haphazard cross-country cyber sampling is less efficient than systematic tests with
populations based on theoretical predictions. Finally, the evidence makes it clear that as norms
evolve over time, so does our psychology; historical differences can tell us a lot about contemporary
psychological patterns. This means that researchers need to think about psychology from a historical
perspective and begin to devise ways to bring history and psychology together

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Here's a link to the pdf , if it would be helpful.

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https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/files/he..._final.pdf

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[John 6IX Breezy]

"Tade-offs in Choice' and 'The Cultural Foundation of Human Memory', and 'The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation' are the most likely candidates based on the abstracts. The one you mention seems to be the least alchemic.

My next question would be, what about them seemed pseudoscientific to you? And I suppose we could narrow down on the one Nudger linked to if you want to be specific.

[Jackalope]

Physics is a scientific belief and is based on truth, which is religion.

Can I get your dealer's number?!? He's getting you the good shit.

Seconded. I want in on whatever that dude is smoking.