Larry Moran summarizes some criticisms of evolutionary psychology. He even cites philosophers who recognize the deep flaws in the field! But then, as a coup de grâce, he carries out the most damaging criticism of all: he quotes an evolutionary psychologist. Dang. That’s low.
Even more cruelly, he quotes the ridiculous Gad Saad, a professor of marketing who has made a career out of peddling poor interpretations of evolution designed to pander to MRAs and other frauds. Saad was asked to provide a list of notable achievements by evolutionary psychology, and he obliged.
- Women alter their preferences for the facial features of men as a function of where they are in their menstrual cycles. When maximally fertile, they prefer men possessing markers of high testosterone.
- Babies display an immediate instinctual preference for symmetric faces (at an age that precedes the capacity for socialization).
- Children who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia display a reversal in their toy preferences. Furthermore, using inter-species comparisons, vervet monkeys display the same sex-specific patterns of play/toy preferences as human infants. This suggests that contrary to the argument made by social constructivists, play has an evolved biological basis.
- Individuals who score high on an empathy scale are more likely to succumb to the contagion effects of yawning. This is indicative that this particular contagion might be linked to mimicry and/or Theory of Mind.
- How provocatively a woman dresses is highly correlated to her menstrual cycle (a form of sexual signaling found across countless Mammalian species).
- Culinary traditions are adaptations to local niches. For example, the extent to which a culture utilizes meat versus vegetables, spices, or salt is a cultural adaptation (this is what behavioral ecologists study).
- Maternal grandmothers and paternal grandfathers invest the most and the least respectively in their grandchildren. Whereas all four grandparents have a genetic relatedness coefficient of 0.25 with their grandchildren, they do not all carry the same level of “parental uncertainty.” In the case of maternal grandmothers, there is no uncertainty whereas in the case of the paternal grandfather, there are two sources of uncertainty. This last fact drives the differential pattern of investment in the grandchildren.
- Good male dancers are symmetric (paper published in Nature). One would expect that some behavioral traits might correlate with phenotypic quality as honest signals of an individual’s desirability on the mating market.
- Self-preference for perfumes is linked to one’s immunogenetic profile (Major Histocompatibility Complex).
- When a baby is born, most family members (especially those of the mother) are likely to state that the baby looks like the father. This phenomenon is found in countless cultures despite the fact that it is objectively impossible to make such a claim of resemblance. The reason for this universally found cultural tradition lies in the need to assuage the fears of paternity uncertainty.
- Environmental stressors (e.g., father absence) and the onset of menarche (first menses) have been shown to be highly linked. In numerous species, the likelihood of a female becoming reproductively viable is affected by environmental contingencies.
- Women are less receptive to mandatory hospital DNA paternity testing (for obvious reasons). In other words, their willingness to adopt a new product/service is fully driven by an evolutionary-based calculus.
- Women can smell the most symmetric men. In other words, women have the capacity to identify men who possess the best phenotypic quality simply via their nose. This is what I have referred to as sensorial convergence.
- Using fMRI, the exposure to ecologically-relevant stimuli (e.g., beautiful faces) yields distinct neural activation patterns in men and women.
- In choosing a mate, humans tend to prefer the smell of others that are maximally dissimilar to them along the MHC. This ensures that offspring possess a greater “defensive coverage” in terms of their immunological system.
That’s a curious mix of dubious pop psychology, random correlations, non-universal cultural biases, and unjustified assumptions that certain behaviors have a genetic, as opposed to psychological, basis. For example, you don’t need a gene for assuming that infidelity exists…you can know how conception works and figure out that women can get pregnant by men who are not their socially defined partner, which may be why there is a certain level of distrust of paternity claims.
There’s also a total inability to recognize that physiological properties are not always adaptive consequences. For instance, evolutionary psychologists seem to be obsessed with ascribing deep evolutionary causes to fluctuations in behavior associated with menstruation. I can certainly believe in hormonally-driven variation in personality and behavior — that’s unexceptional and ordinary — but to then argue that small day-to-day differences in behavior have all been driven by a necessarily intense selection pressure is absurd panadaptationism.
You might also expect a Professor of Marketing to realize that a culture saturated with commercial marketing of stereotypical sexual imagery might develop abnormal response patterns — we are bathed in messaging that is conditioning us to advertisers’ influence, and may not have anything at all to do with our evolutionary history. There’s a circularity to it all. Marketing is all about shaping our preferences in particular directions, and then you get EP marketing professors trying to persuade us that they have no influence at all, they’re just discerning the deep patterns evolution has burned into our brains, so that they can be better able to influence us to buy their cologne and the associated body images with which they advertise it.
Also, and this might just be my personal bias, but marketing is simply the blood-laced, putrefying pus oozing from the suppurating teats of that great Satan, Capitalism, upon which Evolutionary Psychology greedily feeds. It is a potent poison that is not to be trusted.
Professor of Marketing? Damn, if I’d known I could have gotten a Masters in Lying I probably would have done it for the lulz. Think what the exams are like in the Department of Lies!
Oh no, not the vervets again!
Well, but I do think marketing actually is a skill, and it can be an effective one at that. We’ve been manipulated by marketing all of our lives.
It’s just that it’s not a skill that’s at all about discerning any truths.
Marketing is a set of tools and techniques (more than just advertising!), and like any tools can be used for good or bad things. That big red box on the left of the screen asking me to donate to your defense fund? That’s marketing communications…
That comparison is doing injustice to Satan. Yahweh would be more appropriate.
I thought #2 was pretty old, and present in many if not all animals.
#6 is evo psych how? Isn’t it quite precisely *not* evolutionary? It’s an odd one to include since there *are* genetic markers for certain dietary preferences that seem to have been driven by adaptive pressure (namely lactose tolerance persistence in regions with cows; and high-fat diet adaptations in the Arctic).
#12 you only need to believe in the radical notion that women are people to understand this one.
What is this hangup with facial symmetry, and what has it got to do with reproductive fitness? I take livestock to the vet to be evaluated for reproductive fitness and let me tell you, the vet does not look at the animal’s face. Not even once. In addition… as an artist who used to do portraits… *no one* has a perfectly symmetrical face. Remember that Star Wars pic of Han Solo with Chewbaca? Get out a ruler or some other straight edge and check out Harrison Ford’s face. REALLY not symmetrical.
Idiots.
My favourite is number 6. “People cook with food they have access to, not foods they can’t get.”
I’m glad we have evolutionary psychologists to explain these sorts of complex interactions to us.
@Derek Vandivere, 4: I don’t know if a donations button really qualifies as “marketing”. It uses some of the same techniques as marketing, but surely marketing proper involves selling people stuff — it’s got “market” right in the name.
One time, I could swear I was smelling the symmetries of a square, which as we all know is the best sort of quadrilateral. I suspect it had something to do with evolution and what I like to call “buzzword supersaturation.”
I’m just fucking with you. I’ve never been that stoned before.
Or, and hear me out here, women might not care for an mandatory expense that in the vast majority of cases has is going to be of no point beyond the people making it mandatory saying “bitches be lyin’.”
kestrel@#7:
What is this hangup with facial symmetry, and what has it got to do with reproductive fitness?
One of the problems psychology has is that it’s built on a legacy of bullshit. So, new bullshit must not contradict old bullshit. There was a study back in the 70s (I think it was) regarding people rating faces as “attractive” or not and it concluded that symmetrical features were the distinguishing factor in “attractive.” From that the researchers appear to have concluded that “attractive” has something to do with reproductive fitness* and there you go!
Here’s a fun thing to do with any social science or psychology theory: google for it and add “replication” to the search. A tremendous number of 70s and 80s social science theories – including some of the big ones like ego depletion – have all been burst like soap bubbles. For example, that “symmetry” stuff – you can pretty much bet that the paper was based on surveying American college undergraduates. So, right there, you’ve got cultural bias – the researcher probably was measuring American college undergraduates unreported racism, not anything to do with what is “attractive” or not.
(* “reproductive fitness” apparently mapping in psychologists’ minds to American notions of romantic love and marriage, which – as you know – have fuck all to do with how humans picked their partners for most of human history.)
PS – shorter me: “mate selection? you get to select your mate? aaaahahahahahahahahahaahaaa!”
Or is it possible that women don’t see the value in a mandatory (really?!??) expense that in the vast majority of cases will have no point beyond saying “women lie”?
Way back in the early eighties I was taught that one possible reason for the preference for symmetrical faces, indeed symmetrical bodies, may be that symmetry indicates immunological fitness.The proposal was that as we do not grow symetrically, that is one side grows a little then the other side, that illness affects growth (diverting energy that should be used for growth to defeating the disease which will affect final symmetry), but that those who fight off the disease most quickly will be least affected, and thus fittest. I have no idea if there is any validity to this idea.
#9 / Zepp: I think of marketing more broadly as creating a value proposition (which could be a product, a service, or an idea), communicating that proposition to the target market, and persuading the target market that the proposition is valid (i.e., getting the sale).
In this case, the market is us, the readers of the blog, and the value proposition is the idea that PZ’s writing is worth something to you – specifically, that it’s worth donating to his legal defense fund in order to keep him writing.
As someone with a couple of psychology degrees I was impressed with Gad Saad’s points. Has he verified these using advanced astrology?+ I would probably been falling of my chair with laughter but I was to busy trying to link each statement to which discredited study it came from. The symmetric man studies have me stumped.
@ kestrel
You clearly need a better vet, one who will carefully examine the face and perhaps carry out some phrenological examinations. I also hear that acupuncture for horses is becoming popula
…sure, buddy.
Presumably this test was conducted on babies “at an age that precedes the capacity for socialization”.
Marcus Ranum@11 once again demonstrates what an extraordinary polymath he is – an expert on the whole of psychology and social science.
and:
Two amazing insights from Marcus, completely contradicting each other. I am truly awed.
#16: I actually agree that there is a marketing component here — when I ask for donations, there’s an implicit exchange of value for money. I think, though, that we also have to admit that I’m a crappy marketer.
“Donate to Pharyngula, so I can give you hot tips on confirming the loyalty of your spouse, determining the paternity and maternity of your offspring, and discovering how you too can influence your development to acquire a more symmetrical face! Prospective mates will be begging to help you propagate your genes!”
Obviously, I don’t have to actually do any of that if the marketing is really effective.
Well, say what you will, but at least there doesn’t seem to be a replication crisis in this case — plenty of reason to think it’ll appear again in another thread.
@Derek Vandivere, 16: That broad a use of “marketing” gives me consumer capitalist newspeak vibes.
If I donate to PZ it’s not because of the value I, personally, derive from his blog, but because I support his goals and ideology as expressed by it. I’m supporting an ideological-political struggle, not buying blog posts.
So I don’t think it’s useful to call everything that involves making a value proposition “marketing”. It might be good to have a term for that general activity, but “marketing” seems inappropriate.
Vervets!
@ Marcus
One of the problems psychology has is that it’s built on a legacy of bullshit
Or, more accurately, you only know a small area of a very broad disciple, are unacquainted with the current state of the field and are attacking all areas of the field when you are complaining about one or two specific areas?
Some areas and some studies in some areas are complete bullshit but this is not true of the entire field.
The replication crisis has definitely shaken up some accepted theories but it looks like a lot of the medical and clinical pharmacology fields are navigating the same minefields. It could be argued that psychology is simply facing the issue before other fields have.
A recent paper suggests than over 50% of empirical economic research is very unlikely to replicate. See Ioannidis, Stanley &o Doucouliagos. (2017). The Power of Bias in Economics Research The Economic Journal. This may be behind a paywall. I though I had downloaded a copy off the net but now cannon find it to supply a link.
If you wish to see how rigorous the intellectual underpinnings of classical economic theory are have a look at David Graeber. (2011) Debt: The first 5,000 years https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf. They are up there with Freud and Jung for intellectual rigour.
If you really want to see voodoo science in action have a look at the so-called “forensic” sciences. Read the
Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward (2009) https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-science-in-the-united-states-a-path-forward. It is terrifying.
Two of my favourites are finger prints based on the assumption that they are unique(completely unproven as far as I can see but I think Galton made that assertion so it must be true) and for which no believable reliability evidence exists and the polygraph which has no scientific rationale and dubious reliability and validity. Well my person opinion is that it’s like witchcraft. If you are stupid enough to believe in it, it may work.
@ 21 PZ Myers
Anything for hair loss?
Ah, sorry for the somewhat double posts. The first one disappeared so I thought either it was eaten because of the b-word or I cancelled it absentmindedly. It looks like it went into moderation because of the b-word.
@3 PZ — oh, a talented analytic marketing team can discern many truths, even if they are as trivial as Puerto Rican teenage girls this 3-digit-zip of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan watch Friends at a rate much higher than Mexican teenage girls across the Hudson in Passaic and Hoboken, so NY local station X should run advertisement Y in that market at that hour, while NJ local station should not. A marketing department is only as effective as the truths it can discern.
The rule that bugged me the most was #5. “Provocatively”, for one thing, means different things to different people. I’m guessing Saad is the type who finds 9th grade soccer jocks showing up for practice in leggings to be far too provocative. Standard attire at an NYC nightclub or a yuppie wedding nowadays would have had you arrested on a Times Square street corner in 1970. In olden days a glimpse of stocking was seen as something shocking, now goodness knows, anything goes. Some Muslim cultures make you cover everything, others just your face, others everything but your face.
So at one obvious level, how is choice in attire anything BUT socially conditioned??? As for changes during ovulation? Ummm, again, contextual — you could be a raging horndog, but if it’s granny’s funeral or an interview with a conservative law firm, you’re going to dress like Secretary Clinton. Whereas two weeks earlier, your endocrine system in hibernation mode, you land a date with a gorgeous man at the trendiest new nightclub in town? Hell yeah that LBD and push-up bra are coming out of the closet.
Also, conflating correlation with causation. If a woman might be hornier when ovulating, then it isn’t necessarily deeply coded evo-psych messaging from her homo habilis sisters whispering across eons, “wear the clean pelt tonight”. Rather, she might e thinking, damn I’m horny, haven’t gotten any in a while, maybe Sheila and Debby and I can hit Boylston St. and meet a few guys. The clothing is the afterthought.
And truly, anyone who genuinely believes that clothes are NOT among our most obvious social constructs, with virtually nothing to do with genes, is buck eejit.
Or for that matter, the extensive work in behavioural/experimental economics (which can equally be regarded as part of psychology) demonstrating the multiple systematic ways in which actual human behaviour deviates from that of the Homo economicus model beloved of neoclassical economists. Kahneman and Tversky are perhaps best known here, but the cross-cultural work of Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and colleagues is also very impressive.
It is quite true there’s a lot of poor work in psychology and social science. I suspect it’s not a markedly higher proportion than in many natural science fields, but not being a Ranum-order polymath, I hesitate to be dogmatic about that. I also strongly suspect that the “publish or perish” culture of modern academia, and the proliferation of profitable but not particularly discriminating journals and conferences, have a lot to do with the issue.
Tabby Lavalamp
Yep.
I truly, absolutely, have nothing to fear from a paternity test*, but it would be the end of our relationship if my husband demanded one.
*My eldest actually does look like her dad, though that resemblance developed over time. I have witnessed people commenting on how much a kid resembled his dad when his mum and dad only met when he was about six months old…
As for the vervets, I am pretty impressed that the gendered preference for wheels and cooking pots apparently developed in species that know neither wheels nor fire…
KG@#20:
Marcus Ranum@11 once again demonstrates what an extraordinary polymath he is – an expert on the whole of psychology and social science.
Oh come on, obviously I am generalizing. That’s what one does when one describes an entire field. Basically what you’re saying is #notallpsychology – which is true, but when I said “built on a legacy of bullshit” it ought to be obvious I was talking about the early stuff. If you want to go digging through that and arguing which nuggets aren’t bullshit, you’re welcome to; it’d be fascinating to watch. You’ll note that I’m suggesting it would be more practical to identify the parts of psychology that aren’t bullshit than to enumerate those that are.
As far as the “extraordinary polymath” stuff; I have never described myself in such a way. So, I guess you’re welcome to your opinion. I actually do have a BA in psychology which is why I learned enough about the field to see it as I do. My degree is from the mid 1980s so I am mostly referring to what learned about psychology up to the early 80s.
Two amazing insights from Marcus, completely contradicting each other. I am truly awed.
How do they contradict each other? Studies that are built on biased data, or that otherwise fail to replicate are bullshit (see my early characterization of a lot of psychology as bullshit). With respect to bullshit built on bullshit, when you’ve got studies like ego depletion that don’t replicate, that ought to clue you in that studies referencing ego depletion are built on bullshit and are probably bullshit. I don’t think that’s an unfair characterization, at all. If anything, I’m being generous.
You seem to personally dislike me. In other comments you’ve said things that seem to indicate that you think I am trying to deceive people, or something – I’m not really sure what your issue is, but you seem inspired to try to chew on my ankle a lot. Was it something I did or said and is there something I can do to help you feel better?
The monkey toy preference thing is idiotic on its face. Are we supposed to believe that monkeys recognize what cars, balls, pots, or dolls are? Monkeys can’t cook, so why would female monkeys be drawn to a plastic container? Monkeys don’t play sports, so why would a male monkey be drawn to a rubber sphere?
jrkrideau@#25:
Or, more accurately, you only know a small area of a very broad disciple, are unacquainted with the current state of the field and are attacking all areas of the field when you are complaining about one or two specific areas?
I dunno about the “small area” bit. Maybe the BA program at Johns Hopkins does not adequately cover the field? Should I be asking for a refund? Certainly I am unacquainted with the current state of the field – that was why I characterized the foundations of psychology as bullshit built on bullshit; the current state is doubtless not built on bullshit at all. Except for, you know, that they still use IQ tests, still reference debunked theories like ego depletion, still reference studies based on biased surveys, etc. Don’t shoot me, I’m only the messenger.
Of course I am speaking generally when I attack psychology. It’s a big field. But while we’re chatting about it, where would you chalk up evolutionary psychology? Do we put that in the “bullshit” column, or maybe in the “50% bullshit” column? I know, #notallevolutionarypsychology and “you can’t broadly dismiss an entire science, there may be parts of it that are not bullshit” yadda yadda. I actually am usually pretty careful to throw in some #notallpsychology so let me say: neuroscience! They’re doing good work there. It’s like the psychologists saw that neurologists were studying interesting stuff and said “that’s part of psychology now!” but it’s absolutely good work.
The replication crisis has definitely shaken up some accepted theories but it looks like a lot of the medical and clinical pharmacology fields are navigating the same minefields. It could be argued that psychology is simply facing the issue before other fields have.
“Shaken up” is a weird way to describe demonstrating that a theory is false. But, OK. Medicine and Pharmacology have the advantage that they’re not entirely based on surveys; they can measure actual patient outcomes. I do think there is a problem that studies are still referencing studies that didn’t replicate. If there is no “ego depletion” that is measured in non-biased samples, then any paper that’s based on ego depletion theory is garbage. Unfortunately, there is not any dependency graph that shows what is built on what. But imagine if there were still physics papers referencing old material on phlogiston – those papers would not get published. But in psychology things like ego depletion migrate into popular psychology and then mainstream psychology gets to wash its hands of them. Except that it doesn’t – for fuck’s sake, if you google for “APA Myers Briggs” you find stuff like [apa] I’d expect that citation to have a disclaimer like “Myers Briggs is for entertainment purposes only, do not take seriously…” except it’s on APA’s site!
A recent paper suggests than over 50% of empirical economic research is very unlikely to replicate.
I’m not surprised. But I don’t know much about economics (it’s never made sense to me and puts me to sleep) and – pace KG – I don’t think I’m a polymath and I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to comment on the validity of economics research.
If you’re saying “sure psychology sucks, but not as bad as the economists,” I’m willing to accept that argument. It’s the weirdest defense of psychology that I’ve ever seen, though.
If you really want to see voodoo science in action have a look at the so-called “forensic” sciences.
Yes, those are horrible. Given the problems with forensic science (mostly promoted by the FBI’s labs) and the procedural flaws – if not outright fraud – in FBI and police labs, I’d say forensic science ought to be binned and rebooted.
By the way, APA says polygraphs are not valid “lie detector tests” [apa] which is good. I hope you remember that psychology originally embraced using polygraph measures based on the theory that lying required effort (hey, look! ego depletion again!) It takes zero time to search up articles where psychologists relied on polygraphs [1 but neuroscience to the rescue! Let’s use fMRI. Psychologists do appear to have ditched polygraph, and there was much rejoicing. Being a skinnerian, I’m uncomfortable with the assertion that galvanic skin response is connected in any way with emotional states, or that people’s galvanic skin response is the same when they experience similar emotional states.
KG@#29:
Kahneman and Tversky are perhaps best known here
Cognitive biases are really interesting, and K&T’s work is fascinating. But wouldn’t you say it remains to be demonstrated that the cognitive biases they identified are universal human traits, or whether they are social artifacts? It’d be fascinating to know if a !Kung bushman has the same heuristics in decision-making as an American college student. I’m not saying that their work isn’t fascinating – because it is valuable to be able to generalize about cognitive biases in, say, American investment bankers – but the “cognitive” part of “cognitive bias” implies it is not a “learned bias” – a plain old bias. There’s a temptation to infer that there is more going on here than a learned behavior. I’m officially on the fence about that.
If someone demonstrated that all humans in all cultures shared certain cognitive biases always, that’d be a great big win for evolutionary psychology, wouldn’t it?
I’ll also note that K&T blew big holes in earlier psychological theories of how humans were expected to behave (e.g.: Maslow’s heirarchy of needs)*. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to score K&T as a check-mark in the “psychology is bullshit” column, though I would also score a check-mark in the “psychology has some interesting stuff” column.
(* Since Maslow’s heirarchy was a simple ordering of desires, and K&T’s research showed that people do not always choose things in terms of a simple, obvious ordering, K&T refuted Maslow. Which is irrelevant, because Maslow pulled his whole theory out of his ass one fine day in 1943…)
It has always seemed to me that the premise behind evolutionary psychology — certain behaviors are evolutionarily advantageous and they got hard wired — is not particularly remarkable. Obviously, for example, parents who bond with and protect their offspring are more likely to have successful offspring than parents who abandon their offspring. Basic stuff like that fits under the heading of “duh”.
But what is remarkable is how EP has been turned from a simple statement of the obvious into a justification for misogyny, racism, homophobia, and political conservatism. And at that point it’s nothing more than someone taking subjective opinions, adding a whole lot of confirmation bias, and finding what they want to find.
You really don’t see it? That’s surprising.
That’s the dogma to which they adhere: don’t let go of the legacy of old bullshit that the field has inherited. Only build new bullshit on top of the old which is consistent with it.* At the same time, you think it is also true that they don’t adhere to it:
That’s contradictory. The new bullshit which burst the bubbles is exactly the sort of thing which denies the veracity of the old bullshit, and that is what you said doesn’t happen. There isn’t a non-psychological approach to such questions, so “the new bullshit” (if you want to keep the term, even though you cite it with approval) must at least have an equal claim to being genuine psychology, if not a better one.
Imagine a creationist saying that new developments in evolutionary biology contradict Darwin, for example. You shouldn’t have a problem noticing that, for both new and old, this is genuine evolutionary biology that we’re talking about. So, one can’t maintain that the field is constrained to be consistent with the old bullshit while also being responsible for bursting the bubbles of that bullshit, by developing a new theory (for better or worse). Developments of that kind are an entirely unremarkable thing that happens in science, not some kind of a scandal demonstrating that it’s all just a load of crap. Anyway, a creationist may wish to discredit both (i.e., all of evolution) if possible, but it can’t be done this way, because that can’t be what actually happened. They at least would have to tell a consistent story about the problems in evolutionary biology, if there are any; and in an instance like this, they couldn’t be doing that.
*Bullshit, in the technical sense of Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, doesn’t need to work this way. It’s not like a lie, concerned with deliberately convincing the listener of something which is believed to be false. You would have to care what the truth is and intend for the listener to believe something else. (Not everybody does care, however.) In order to keep up the lie, if that is your goal, you may need to invent new lies which are consistent with the old one.
In contrast, bullshit (in this sense) disregards the truth or falsity of a claim, or it treats such things as irrelevant to what the bullshitter wants to accomplish – that may be practically anything, besides convincing the listener to have a false belief, but getting the listener on your side is vaguely what people want to do most of the time. So you may sometimes tell a consistent story, sometimes not; and your reasons for doing this have little or nothing to do with what you believe is true or false. You just want money, power, fame, people you can manipulate to be on your side, or whatever the case may be.
consciousness razor@#35:
That’s contradictory. The new bullshit which burst the bubbles is exactly the sort of thing which denies the veracity of the old bullshit, and that is what you said doesn’t happen. There isn’t a non-psychological approach to such questions, so “the new bullshit” (if you want to keep the term, even though you cite it with approval) must at least have an equal claim to being genuine psychology, if not a better one.
Ah. Begley and Ionnadis are not psychologists; they’re medical doctors.
They are applying actual fucking science to psychology bullshit – they are not another layer of bullshit. Perhaps that will help you better understand my comment. Psychology is trying to fix its methods and is, to be fair, managing to replicate some studies, but it’s still got a huge amount of research built on ideas that are pretty much debunked – theories like learned helplessness, ego depletion, etc. (learned helplessness was obviously bullshit to skinnerians but it immediately took an important place in the popular consciousness because psychologists talked about it a lot and recklessly generalized dog behaviors into a theory of human behavior)
So, perhaps it will help you understand things a bit more if you contextualize the replication crisis as “a couple of non-psychologists who took a look at psychology and pointed out that at least half of it was bullshit.” They are not building on psychology, they plowed it with salt and walked away and did the same thing to other sciences, too. I believe even physics is having a replication crisis, but I’m pretty ignorant about physics.
Psychologists have reacted by trying to replicate some classical studies and are discovering that once you control for bias many of them don’t replicate. That’s a shot below the water-line. What I meant about bullshit depending on bullshit is that a paper that uses ego depletion or learned helplessness (etc.) as part of its theory should be considered invalidated. Unfortunately, right now that’s about half the psych papers out there. If you add to the mix that there a tremendous number of studies built on biased samples, that kills a lot of the other half. Let me remind you – there are shittons of psychology papers that are based only on measuring populations of college undergrads, yet those papers are treated as though they observe behaviors that generalize across humanity. Then there are the papers that try to imply that rat behaviors somehow generalize to humans. Ugh.
Anyhow, perhaps that helps explain why I see no contradiction in my comment. I could have been more clear but I was, obviously, generalizing as one does when one shitcans most of a discipline. (By the way, I don’t consider it unreasonable at all to shitcan a discipline in general any more than it’s unreasonable to say “christianity is bullshit” in a conversation. I don’t have to individually assay all the bullshit in christianity to say that, and a rejoinder like “but Jerusalem is real!” is not much better of a rejoinder than “some parts of psychology aren’t bullshit!” Dismissing psychology or christianity with sweeping statements is not intended to be a detailed argument, right? And if we want to be proper skeptics let psychology prove its case against epistemological and skeptical challenges. But we haven’t got years and this is casual commenting on a blog that we’re doing here.)
I do now understand why you and KG thought my comment was contradictory.
Shorter me: the new stuff that burst psychology’s bubble is not bullshit and it’s not psychology either.
It makes no difference what it says on a person’s name tag or on their office door. How would one go about showing that a psychological theory is wrong, without doing any psychological theorizing? Just a simple explanation responding to that one simple question — that’s all I’m looking for here.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. There are things like string theory or various flavors of multiverse, which fail to make testable predictions, and there are some people out there (typically defenders of these ideas) who believe we need to accept them despite that fact. That’s not about replication, since the issue is basically that there’s nothing to repeat, but it’s the closest guess I can make.
But let’s use physics as an example, since maybe your perspective on it won’t be too biased.
Suppose someone wants to criticize a theory of motion, for example. They’re not physicists. But we seem to agree that this doesn’t matter, and that we should hear them out anyway, because good arguments might come from anywhere. Let’s do that.
They think it’s “bullshit” and believe they can show this fact to others. How would they do that? It’s not going to work, to say that they have confidently and rigorously determined that this theory doesn’t reliably make correct predictions (i.e., in a way that can be replicated) about the motion of objects, if at no point does their analysis involve examining real objects to see whether they move as the theory predicts they should move. If you can imagine them doing it in some other way, without checking on some actual things that move around (and let’s just hope this non-checking sort of procedure they’ve got may be replicated, or else we’ll be in trouble), then I’d like to hear how you think that could possibly happen.
But do you know what this process is called, when they actually do the work required, in a situation like this? It’s not “medicine” if the person happens to be a doctor and “garbage collecting” if the person happens to be a garbage collector. It’s just “physics.”
Marcus @36:
Well, there was the “FTL neutrinos” thing, and the “evidence for cosmic inflation (BICEP2)” thing. Both of these were corrected pretty quick, and saying they point to a crisis is a stretch. Maybe there’s more I missed…
Marcus Ranum@31
Well maybe “one” should stop fucking doing something so fucking stupid if “one” doesn’t want to be regarded as a fucking idiot.
Basically what you’re saying is #notallpsychology – which is true, but when I said “built on a legacy of bullshit” it ought to be obvious I was talking about the early stuff.
Nope. I suppose it might have been obvious if you’d actually said so. But “ego depletion”, which was your example here, seems to date from the late 1990s, when someone called Roy Baumeister coined the term, according to Wikipedia. I’ve no idea where you get the idea that it’s “one of the big ones” (theories), either. I doubt if most psychologists have even heard of it.
Your “new bullshit must not contradict old bullshit” implies that psychologists never correct themselves or their predecessors. Then in the same comment #12, you diss the field because of failures of replication – reported in the literature – which are, of course, examples of psychologists (because who the fuck else do you think is doing this?) correcting themselves. If you can’t see the blatant contradiction, You really are an idiot.
(Added: I see consciousness razor has made the same point, and you now understand why we “think” your obviously contradictory statements contradict each other, and have taken refuge in sheer dishonesty in order to defend them.)
You could stop making stupid pronouncements in areas where you are clearly ignorant.
Marcus Ranum@33
Are you fucking serious? You think a BA course covers the whole of a huge field such as psychology? Let alone the whole of the social sciences, which you also sneeringly dismiss.
Jesus wept. You actually think psychology is based entirely on surveys? If you got this from Johns Hopkins then yes, you should indeed demand your money back.
Marcus Ranum@34
Chalk up “cognitive” as another term Marcus Ranum misunderstands – it implies nothing of the kind. On your broader point here, yes, it’s quite possible cognitive biases vary cross-culturally, and that subsequent research will demonstrate that. One of the reasons I mentioned Bowles and Gintis is that their work is cross-cultural, and demonstrates that behavioural economics experiments give different results in different cultures. You know what? In the “natural” sciences, a lot of work is done showing that previously demonstrated findings do not apply as widely as their original discoverers thought (e.g., that DNA is transcribed into RNA then translated into protein, that the “noble gases” don’t form compounds, that the measured mass of an object is unaffected by its velocity relative to the observer…)
I do mind, because it’s fucking dishonest. If you think Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” was ever generally accepted, that’s just another example of your ignorance.
This is just such blatantly dishonest special pleading that I think it outdoes any of your previous efforts.