Is psychology going to Cincinnati? \ stacker news ~science

pull down to refresh

Is psychology going to Cincinnati?www.experimental-history.com/p/is-psychology-going-to-cincinnati

349 sats \ 8 comments \ @south_korea_ln 11 Oct science

There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?

In my estimation, there are five ways to measure psychology’s progress, and we are succeeding in exactly one of them.

WE’VE DONE A GREAT JOB OVERTURNING OUR INTUITIONS, THUMBS UP ALL AROUND

UNFORTUNATELY, WE’RE STILL LOSING TO BULLSHITTERS

When I saw this result, I broke out in a sweat. Whatever it is we psychologists do, we’ve done a lot of it to the Big Five. After millions of dollars and thousands of studies, we are not obviously better at predicting life outcomes than people who… didn’t do any of that.

WE HAVE A HARD TIME USING OUR KNOWLEDGE TO DO STUFF

When you watch the nudgers in action, though, it doesn’t look like we’ve learned that much. In 2022, a big group of psychologists published a “megastudy” where they tried 53 different interventions to increase gym attendance. These are the best behavioral scientists in the biz, working with a big budget, and trying to get people to do something they already do and want to do even more.

The results: less than half of the interventions worked. When experts in behavioral science and public health tried to predict the outcomes, they did no better than chance.

WE HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO TURN OUR KNOWLEDGE INTO TECHNOLOGY

I don’t think psychology has anything like this. The closest thing I can think of are apps and programs that are built around ideas from psychology, like Anki (a memorization app), Save More Tomorrow (a retirement savings program), or any of the CBT apps on the market today. But beyond those literal three things, I’m drawing a blank. I know lots of things will claim to be built on solid psychological findings, but that doesn’t mean they actually are, or that they actually work, or that those findings are actually solid.

OUR OLD QUESTIONS HAVEN’T BECOME SILLY YET

I've omitted a lot. The article is pretty interesting, and... sad but true... confirms some of the biases I have against social sciences... However, the author, who is a psychologist, goes on to suggest how to solve these problems. And that is, by tackling some very obvious problems that actually do not have answers yet. He lists these 3 to begin with:

The average American watches 2.7 hours of television per day. We write this off as “leisure,” as if that’s an explanation. Why is it fun to watch someone make a salad on TV? Why do some people find it fun to stare at a person spinning a wheel and buying vowels, while other people find it fun to stare at vampires kissing? Why can an episode of “Paw Patrol” stop rampaging toddlers in their tracks?

People come up with new things all the time—new business ideas, new novels, new salads to make on TV. How do they do this? We’ve got mathematicians saying that the solution to a problem just appeared to them while they were getting on a bus, we’ve got writers saying they feel like they’re “taking dictation from God”, we’ve got Paul McCartney saying “Yesterday” came to him a dream. What the hell is going on here?10

Why do so many drugs have paradoxical reactions? For example: some people feel better when they take antidepressants, but some people feel way worse. Some of this mystery will have to be unraveled from the bottom up by the folks who study the brain, but some of it will have to be unraveled from the top down by the folks who study the mind.

I am quite surprised these do not have answers, as I would definitely be interested if they had.

Lots of interesting points in the HN comments.

view all related items

21 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 11 Oct

To be fair, couldn’t the same be said about many fields? Like an old physics professor of mine used to criticize certain aspects of theoretical physics for some of the same problems listed above. (Stacking up papers that have no technological application or even experimental verifiability)

And I thought one product of the psychological sciences is better statistical methods for testing and assessing things like intellectual ability or other psychological traits. These are widely used in school systems for example and Im sure there have been advances in the last few decades.

That being said, behavioral sciences is having a bit of a low point in its reputation even within economics, I think. Not least because the field seems ripe for charlatanism (see the case of Francesca Geno). I always thought that the behavioral economics papers are a bit too cute and probably don’t translate to the real world when stakes are high

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln OP 11 Oct

About Francesca Geno, I posted about her a while ago: #682960

Indeed, behavioral science is going through a bit of an existential crisis.

one product of the psychological sciences is better statistical methods

I didn't know that. Not too surprising, seen how important statistics are in those sciences.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 11 Oct

Ah I must have missed that post, would have liked to engage on it.

At my former university, the chair of the political science department published a paper with a grad student. The paper won an award and the grad student had a job lined up at a top tier university. It later came out that the student had completely faked the data. He was so brazen that he even lied about grant funding in the "thanks" section of the paper.

What kinda pissed me off was that the tenured professor who was supposedly overseeing this research got little to no blowback. if you're going to put your name on it, and if you're the senior author, and you're ready to claim credit, I think you should also be penalized if the paper turns out to be fraudulent--even if you weren't the one to actually engage in the fraud.

33 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln OP 11 Oct

Like an old physics professor of mine used to criticize certain aspects of theoretical physics for some of the same problems listed above. (Stacking up papers that have no technological application or even experimental verifiability)

Theoretical particle physics, string theory, etc come to mind reading this comment ;) Got few colleagues in those fields, so gotta be careful saying the quiet part out loud.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 11 Oct

What kind of physics do you do?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 11 Oct

I haven’t watched television as television since 2000. However, I would say that television and its concomitant, advertising, has advanced to where the television watchers look to be mindless zombies taking directions directly by mainline from the TV. And worse yet it starts in childhood for all those poor kids whose parents use the television as a baby-sitting device. Just as bad as the television, IMHO, is the smartphone and social media who apply psychological tools to addict the vulnerable to their stuff. I think that is horrible, what do you think?

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln OP 11 Oct

Oh, very much. Gamification and dopamine hits are prime example of using psychology to hook people to come back. For things such as Duolingo, great, much less for the Tiktok and FB reels that one ends up watching without even realizing you started. I still remember the time before, but I'm afraid for the younger generation. It's my main concern in raising my kid, not to let him become a mindless zombie with brain rot and a 2-second attention span.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 11 Oct

We were lucky. Our kids are older than the smartphone and video games. Our concern was the television. To overcome the problems with the television, we used bribery! First, the school did an avoid television for a week and get a reward kind of contest. Then right away they went into a read books and get a reward contest. Our kids competed for the rewards and got them. So, that was the first two weeks. After that, is was strictly the bribery route. We offered them $2 per week, each, for not watching TV. After about another month, we figured out that we no longer needed to have cable, so we quit and used that money to up the bribe level a bit. They didn’t get smartphones until they started working and earning their own money, after they were adults. That solved that problem. Do you think that this method may work for you?