Does the scientific method apply to psychology?

Does the scientific method apply to psychology? March 30, 2017

imprisoned-2066638_640We’ve blogged about the problem in the field of psychology that so many of their research experiments can’t be replicated.  That means that, according to the scientific method, they are invalid.

The problem continues, and it’s compounded by the fact that the profession doesn’t seem to care!

The proliferation of peer-reviewed articles whose results can’t be repeated keeps building.  Despite these findings, nothing is changing in the way psychologists do their research, the way journals vet their articles, or in the articles that get published.

An article on the subject, quoted and linked after the jump, says that as many as two-thirds of psychology articles “can’t be trusted.”

But let me pose a different way to look at this problem.  Can it be that the same scientific method used for chemistry and biology is unusable in the study of the minds of human beings?  People are active agents, not inanimate objects that follow only natural laws.  So it’s no wonder human beings are unpredictable and inconsistent.  And different subjects and groups react in different ways.

After I quote the article, I quote a commenter, who points out that there may be other ways to design, evaluate, and learn from various kinds of research, in addition to strict application of “the scientific method.”

In fact, the view that the scientific method is the only way to know truth–not logical reasoning (as in philosophy) and certainly not revelation (as in theology)–is surely one of the more reductionist errors of the Enlightenment.

I have no problem jettisoning 2/3 of the published research in experimental psychology–though it would help to know which 2/3–and the lack of response of the professionals in the field is inexcusable.  But maybe what all of this proves, with an abundance of replication, is the protean quality of the human psyche. And that would be an important scientific finding.  It would even be empirical and replicable.

From Ross Pomeroy, Is Psychology Full of Undead Theories? | RealClearScience:

Science is embattled in a raging 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, 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.

[Keep reading. . .]

But also read this comment from school psychologist Peter Dan:

You write that”The field is sliding towards a state of being unfalsifiable” That is precisely the problem: the rigid adherence to the “scientific method” and ever more complicated experimental designs whose only purpose is to try to lay claim of having advanced the theory a little bit. The most influential theories in Psychology, namely Freud’s or Piaget’s were based on case studies, the wekest of all designs. The most influential experiments. like Milgram’s obedience studies or Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment have the simplest design and little -if any- statistical treatements. There are other means of validating a theory for example generativity (how many new ideas did the theory generate) and potdiction (how many previously unexplained phenomena can be explained by the theory) As someone who has been a practicing psychologist for 40 years (and teaching at the graduate level for 20) I value theories to the extent they contribute to the interpretive schematas I use to integrate my findings. Being familiar with a variety of theories helps in developing a more flexible and complex understanding of others’ behavior.

Illustration by bykst, Pixabay, CC0, Public Domain

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