one of my stances has been that psychology comes up with wacky unreplicable findings because there's no central organizing theories for how 'the mind' works and everything is just very black-box.
there are so many studies showing "X manipulation affects Y outcome", but there's not even a hint of an attempt to explain the mechanisms in a meaningful way (cognitive experiments are usually better, but often still guilty of this).
I actually disagree entirely. The amount of forcing theories that are well ahead of the facts that occurs in academic psychology is off the charts.
We could do with a shut up and experiment movement, to be honest.
In order to build useful theories, we need lots more data, and forcing theories onto data actively holds us back from running the wide variety of experiments necessary for a real theory to emerge.
I agree that there isn’t as much raw experimentation and just observing/documenting psychological phenomena that there should be. I’ve ranted about that here in the past.
I guess my peeve is that nobody really collaborates on theories. Every PI is off working on their own set of pet theories (because that’s how you establish a career), but there’s really no centralizing force to get people to collaborate and work on a shared theory. Physics has the standard model that everyone can use as a common reference point and it’s helpful.
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one of my stances has been that psychology comes up with wacky unreplicable findings because there's no central organizing theories for how 'the mind' works and everything is just very black-box.
there are so many studies showing "X manipulation affects Y outcome", but there's not even a hint of an attempt to explain the mechanisms in a meaningful way (cognitive experiments are usually better, but often still guilty of this).
I actually disagree entirely. The amount of forcing theories that are well ahead of the facts that occurs in academic psychology is off the charts.
We could do with a shut up and experiment movement, to be honest.
In order to build useful theories, we need lots more data, and forcing theories onto data actively holds us back from running the wide variety of experiments necessary for a real theory to emerge.
I agree that there isn’t as much raw experimentation and just observing/documenting psychological phenomena that there should be. I’ve ranted about that here in the past.
I guess my peeve is that nobody really collaborates on theories. Every PI is off working on their own set of pet theories (because that’s how you establish a career), but there’s really no centralizing force to get people to collaborate and work on a shared theory. Physics has the standard model that everyone can use as a common reference point and it’s helpful.