Real Clear Politics Real Clear Science Is Psychology Full of Undead Theories?
By _Ross Pomeroy_ (http://www.realclearscience.com/authors/ross_pomeroy/) March 27, 2017 Science is embattled in a raging _replication crisis_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) , in which researchers are unable to reproduce a number of key findings. On the front lines of this conflict is psychology. _In a 2015 review of 98 original psychology papers_ (http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248) , just 36 percent of attempted replications returned significant results, whereas 97 percent of the original studies did. "Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature," reporter Monya Baker warned. "In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted." How did psychology reach such a sorry state of affairs? Back in 2012, when the replication crisis was just beginning to gain prominence in the popular media, psychology professors Moritz Heene and Christopher Ferguson, respectively from Ludwig Maximilian University and Stetson University, offered a blunt, upsetting hypothesis: The field is sliding towards a state of being unfalsifiable, and its adherents either don't notice or don't seem to care. Driving this trend is publication bias, where researchers publish only flashy or positive results. While this is undoubtedly present in almost every scientific field, in psychology, it may simply be business as usual. _A 2010 study_ (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010068) showed that 91.5 percent of results in psychology and psychiatry are positive, more than any other scientific field. Such an overwhelming presence of significant results evinces a situation where researchers and journals simply aren't publishing negative results, perhaps because they conflict with beloved theories, Heene and Ferguson suggest. Such a latent disregard for making facts known has slowly transformed psychology into a field where facts simply don't matter anymore. "The aversion to the null and the persistence of publication bias and denial of the same, renders a situation in which psychological theories are virtually unkillable," Heene and Ferguson write. "Instead of rigid adherence to an objective process of replication and falsification, debates within psychology too easily degenerate into ideological snowball fights, the end result of which is to allow poor quality theories to survive indefinitely." They dubbed these "poor quality" theories "undead theories." Perhaps because they are politicized, enticing, or fodder for lucrative books, they simply aren't subjected to rigorous evaluation, and so they survive, seemingly forever, with hundreds of studies to back them up. But who knows how many unpublished studies may be out there, which reveal those theories' hollow innards? "We suspect a good number of theories in popular use within psychology likely fit within this category; theories that explain better how scholars wish the world to be than how it actually is," Heene and Ferguson say. Could _social priming_ (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/07/30/social-priming-time-for-a-definitive-test/#.WLyj1hAoGkg) fall under this umbrella? What about _ego depletion_ (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in _psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html) ? Is the notion of _contagious yawning_ (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/03/the_entire_research_literature_on_contagious_yawning_could_be_bogus.html) no more than a hulking, rotten zombie? Recent rigorous failed replication attempts suggest all three could be theories from beyond the grave. "Psychological science will benefit greatly from... ending the culture in which null results are aversely treated," Heene and Ferguson conclude. "Otherwise psychology risks never rising above being little more than opinions with numbers." -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
