An interesting reflection on recent troubles in the field. Is this fair?
The Wisconsin legislature made UW system implement post-tenure (5-year) reviews several years ago. The statutory requirements were fed into the…
2 responses to “The “rot” in social psychology”
-
I think that the difficulties many experiments in social psychology have in replication speaks for itself as to the rot in the discipline.
It is of course in the areas freighted with ideology that these problems insinuate, such as priming and sterotype threat.
What's interesting about the article linked to is that the author employs some sophisticated statistical meta-analytic techniques to expose obvious signs of poor methodology and/or bias, focusing in this case on his own papers.
I strongly suspect that the same techniques applied to the output of other authors would unmask far more extreme examples, and that those will often follow ideological divisions. One wonders how many distinguished careers might be undone by evidence of something akin to cheating, built unwittingly into the statistical reports of a body of work. It's rather akin to being able to discover that an individual is or isn't a criminal based on a DNA test not even envisioned in the era in which the crime was committed and the samples taken.
My own view is that in the not distant future we will look back at this era as one in which much of science was corrupted by ideology. In complex areas, it is hard enough to do good, reliable science; when ideology or wishful thinking is allowed to load the dice, it will come out right only by accident.
If one is looking for the low hanging fruit in the philosophy of science, there it is. But only an honest person will get it right. And who even bothers to carry around a lantern these days?
-
I have actually been very struck by the difference between philosophy and social psychology in this regard. Just as Inzlicht notes, there has been a lot of defensiveness in social psychology, with researchers whose findings fail to replicate striking back angrily at the replicators. By contrast, in the world of philosophy, one finds exactly the opposite. In every single case in which a philosopher's experimental work has failed to replicate, the philosopher has been very gracious about the whole issue and has even praised the replicators for their work. I am not sure what explains the difference, but perhaps it arises because philosophers have a well-established cultural norm according to which disagreement is just an ordinary part of the way research is done.
The one thing I find slightly regrettable about the way things have proceeded in philosophy thus far is the difference between the reactions of the original researchers and the reactions of other philosophers interested in the issue. Though the original researchers have always graciously acknowledged the replication failure, there has been a disappointing tendency for other researchers just to continue citing the original experiment as though the replication failure had never taken place.
So please, please, please, before you cite any research in experimental philosophy, take a look at Christian Mott's replications page:
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/xphipage/Experimental%20Philosophy-Replications.html
You can then see whether there have been any replication attempts and, if so, whether they have been successful.
Leave a Reply