Two weeks ago: A study shows that most psychology and social “science” studies are irreproducible BS.
This week: Stanford issues a learned study about “why white people don’t acknowledge white privilege”.
Can’t argue with science that debunks “science”.
The article I read about the high rate of non-reproducibility was in the WaPo. It said “science” in the headline. You had to read the body of the article to find out that the problem described was in psychology and sociology. The problem is that much of the “research” done in those fields is not reproducible science. The methodology is horrible, it finds corelations rather than causation, and it is polluted by the prejudices of the researchers (who have a lot invested, personally and professionally, in certain findings).
There is a famous bit of research that shows that when people are briefly shown an image of a black man and a white man, and one of them is holding a knife, “people” will sometimes mistakenly say the image shows the Black man holding the knife rather than the white man. I don’t have any idea what the real experiment showed (if it was actually conducted).
Think for a minute. Taken at face value, what is scientific about this research? What is its applicability to the real world? What does it say about you, or anyone you know? Hard to say.
What is it used for? That’s easy. It’s used to convince people that whites are ALWAYS prejudiced against Blacks. Does the experiment show that? Not really.
It is a parlor game, that’s all. A lot of social science is like that.
I’d be careful in painting with too broad a brush. Watch the value of the electron charge over time from Millikan’s original experiment onward. Even physics isn’t exactly immune from confirmation bias.
That said, I’m intimately acquainted with many psychology departments for various reasons. I will firmly state that ideological purity has displaced intellectual rigor as the primary basis for hiring in all the programs of which I am familiar; anyone not toeing the line on political correctness in all aspects will not be hired. Which doesn’t mean that some programs aren’t doing good work, it means that the general ability of the discipline to avoid confirmation bias is nearly eliminated since only the zealots are admitted to the discipline.
Then again, it’s a hard field to study. Remember one of Murphy’s Law’s variants is, “Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it damn well pleases.” And when you’re talking people and how they think, well, remember that some poor degenerates actually believe that Progressive policies are actually helpful.
Nerdbert-
The problem with Medieval science (derived from Aristotle) wasn’t that it was irrational, it was that it was too rational. Aristotelians believed in the power of reason more than in the power of the senses. The senses may lie, as any glance at a book of optical illusions will show. This idea that the senses were were unreliable was deeply rooted in the Medieval worldview. The devil seduced us by appeal to the senses, while God appealed to our reason. Love, a sort of madness, entered the mind through the gaze, etc.
Bacon’s great insight was that the senses could could still give us important information about the working of the world, provided certain precautions were taken. Experiments had to be carefully designed to include only observations of the natural world outside of the mind, and above all they had to be repeatable, so that any one experimenter’s faulty senses could not corrupt the results.
The nature of much social research is that it cannot be reproduced, even in theory. If you perform the same experiment with the same set of subjects on different days you may get different results. Social science research is accepted uncritically by the press and the researchers themselves — as long as it fits their worldview. If you can’t meet the criteria of science, you should not call it science.
Psychology is a hard field to study because it’s all based on the private window behind the curtain people put up to protect their egos. Anyone who claims they’ve figured the human psyche out is a liar – or an academic.