Research in psychology: are we learning anything?

For example, there's a lot of basic perceptual psychology regarding response times and color built into many GUI toolkits in the form of GUI widgets (buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc). Change blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness) is also a known problem for error messages and can be easily avoided with good design. There's also a lot of perceptual psychology research in AR and VR too.

With respect to cognitive psychology, there's extensive work in information foraging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging) which has been distilled down as heuristics for information scent.

With respect to social psychology, there are hundreds of scientific papers about collective intelligence, how to make teams online more effective, how to socialize newcomers to online sites, how to motivate people to contribute more content and higher quality content, how and why people collaborate on Wikipedia and tools for making them more effective, and many, many more.

In past work, my colleagues and I also looked at understanding why people fall for phishing scams, and applying influence tactics to improve people's willingness to adopt better cybersecurity practices.

Basically, the author is right about his argument if you have a very narrow view of psychology, but there's a lot of really good work on applied (and practical!) psychology that's going on outside of traditional psychology journals.

One HUGE thing it's missing, though, is the deliberate hacking of results to reach statistical significance. I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible.

In another lifetime, I worked as a research assistant at a very large, well-funded, Ivy League psychology lab. Talk about p-hacking. Our PI would go so far as to deny potential candidates entry into our study, as well as the therapy, simply because the PI thought these candidates wouldn't help the therapy our PI developed look good in our study. Note, these candidates did meet all our OFFICIAL study criteria for entry into the study.

before darwin, you had to have linneaus just describing and cataloging animals.; before {astronomy theory guy}, you had to have {people just tracking and observing stars}.

psychology may have tried to jump the gun a bit by attempting to become theoretical before there were a few generations of folks sitting around quantifying and classifying human behavior.

this was definitely true in cognitive neuroscience. once folks got their hands on fMRI, this entire genre of research popped up that was "replicate an existing psychology study in the scanner to confirm that they used their brain". imo, a lot more was learned by groups that stepped back from theory and just started collecting data and discovering "resting state networks" in the brain.

We're certainly learning how to use psychology to manipulate people though. Advertising, dark patterns, propaganda, and behavioral conditioning just wouldn't be the same without psychology research. We're performing research on children to learn the youngest age they can recognize a brand name (age 3 last I checked) or how best to keep them hooked playing a video game/child casino though and that research is making companies money hand over fist.

> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!

> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.

Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.

So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.

It’s interesting that one comparison they offered was between advice from a random professor versus a session with a therapist. I can remember several helpful conversations with kind, older professors during difficult times. Maybe we should identify people whose life experiences naturally make them good counselors and encourage them to do more of it, instead of making young adults pay $200k for ineffective education and a stamp saying they can charge for therapy.

I don't mind this idea at all! I'm the abyss staring into itself.

That said I don't think digging into skulls until we identify the neurons that cause the big sad or teaching people ways to cope with their awful lives is worth much. I want psychology to help me understand (a maybe terrible) existence, not to solve it. Something like overturning our intuitions is perfect. If tomorrow they make a flawless anti-depressant that will let me endure misery I argue we'll be worse off.

Advancements in PTSD, dissociation, treatment resistant depression and attachment disorders is astounding. We know a lot more about how people work.

Psychology has always been a person centered field - humans are complex, and what it does is more akin to QA than coding. It’s individualized. It doesn’t love studies because the underlying mechanism or traumas can be different even for people who went through the same things.

Unfortunately advancements are not evenly distributed. There is an army of CBT therapists who work in one method that works for some but not the majority. Finding a practitioner is a crapshoot even when looking for specialists.

The DSM is functionally treated as a billing manual, and to be paid practitioners need to jump through a long series of hoops. The medical billing side can’t deal with the complexity.

All these aside, there are people who are really truly healing in ways they wouldn’t without the field. There are ideas that propagate through human culture make human behavior more understandable.

For a while in undergrad I was a double math and psychology major. I spent a semester doing undergraduate research in a psychology lab where I would take people in to do be subjects in the experiment and then write them a check afterwards for participating. During the experiment they'd listen to one syllable sounds some from a english and some not from english and the experiment tested whether the subjects were better at remembering the one syllable sounds from the english language when played one syllable sounds back after listening to the first set.

As I type this I think it's an interesting experiment, but it felt to me that the interesting questions in Psychology need to be so dumbed down to be able to run an experiment to test any hypothesis that what's actually interesting about Psychology get's lost in the weeds of trying to rigorously so the scientific method. I don't know a solution to this or whether it's even a problem, but it's problem endemic to the question of whether we're actually making progress in psychology. For the record, I do think we're making progress in Psychology.

(Found in note [10] in the article.)

This reads, very much in a positive way, like someone is describing the idea of "root cause analysis". That bodes well for this person to epistemicly "know" stuff like they write about. At least they'll be more likely to "know that they don't know" yet, which is a necessary step along the way.

It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "Forget what you know." ("Forget" is even in the quote. I wouldn't be surprised if the author is familiar with the saying.) Perhaps more clearly, "Forget what you think you know." The idea being for one to identify and challenge their assumptions in order to work it out from "first principles".

I can't wait for this to happen on our understanding of a Big Bang because status quo explanation relies on very precise math of things that are thought to happen microseconds after supposed start of existence while our earliest observation is (and can only be) from 380000 years later and new observations with new, more precise instruments seem often to rather contradict cosmological predictions than confirm them.

To me psychology strikes me as more of a religion, albeit a type of secular religion. An inter-dialogue experiment most of us are doing all the time.

When the OP mentioned "folk" science, I thought he'd start talking about folk stories... which actually I think in the realm of psychology would start it getting closer to who we are and how we collectively participate in the world.

For the love of all that's good and noble please do science to Neurolinguistic Programming please.

I think the science allows people to see what the author is attempting fairly clearly. =3

David Bowie (as Nikola Tesla) in The Prestige

Obviously some were more empirical than others so you can’t believe them all, but without engaging with their works — even in a negative way - you’re forced to reinvent the wheel, like the bitcoin people did with banking regulations.

For example, this quote makes me feel the author thinks psychology is more special/unusual than it is:

  We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.”
  

In this case, this whole article is written from the assumption that true, proper, scientific psychology is exclusively the domain of the Behaviorists. This is a popular view among people who run empirical studies all day for obvious reasons (it’s way cheaper and easier to study behavior reliably), but those aren’t the only psychologists. Clinical psychology (therapy) is usually based in cognitive frameworks or psychoanalytical, pedagogy is largely indebted to the structuralism of Piaget, and sociology/anthropology have their own set of postmodern, Marxist, and other oddball influences.

All of those academies are definitely part of psychology IMO, and their achievements are undeniable!

For anyone who finds this interesting and wants to dunk on behaviorists with me, just google “Chomsky behaviorism” and select your fave content medium — he’s been beating this drum for over half a century, lol.

We know, but the know is bad news..

One thing that struck me as to the difficulty / young-ness of this field is also the fact that it is the only science that is us studying our thinking selves. It's almost like trying to draw a picture of the exact spot you are standing on.

I completely agree. This is how I see psychiatry after having experienced it for decades: it's just slightly better than going to a shaman. It's witchcraft and it mostly doesn't work because, well, it's witchcraft. We just are not at a point in history where we can do much about these things and we have to be adults and accept that. It's okay, there was a time when we'd die of simple infections too. That's how psychology is now, very young and full of witchcraft.

Also, the article was funny... And wtf is that cheeseboat?

By this I mean that to make confident predictions, you need some serious statistics, but psych is one of the least math heavy sciences (thankfully they recently learned about Bayes and there's a revolution going on). Unlike physics or chemistry, you have so little control over your experiments.

There's also the problem of measurements. We stress in experimental physics that you can only measure things by proxy. This is like you measure distance by using a ruler, and you're not really measuring "a meter" but the ruler's approximation of a meter. This is why we care so much about calibration and uncertainty, making multiple measurements with different measuring devices (gets stats on that class of device) and from different measuring techniques (e.g. ruler, laser range finder, etc). But psych? What the fuck does it even mean "to measure attention"?! It's hard enough dealing with the fact that "a meter" is "a construct" but in psych your concepts are much less well defined (i.e. higher uncertainty). And then everything is just empirical?! No causal system even (barely) attempted?! (In case you've ever wondered, this is a glimpse of why physicists struggle in ML. Not because the work, but accepting the results. See also Dyson and von Neumann's Elephant)

I've jokingly likened psych to alchemy, meaning proto-chemistry -- chemistry prior to the atomic model (chemistry is "the study of electrons") -- or to astrology (astronomy pre-Kepler, not astrology we see today). I do think that's where the field is at, because there is no fundamental laws. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo (same time as Kepler; they fought), and many others did amazing work and are essential figures to astronomy and astrophysics today. But psych is in an interesting boat. There are many tools at their disposal that could really help them make major strides towards determining these "laws". But it'll take a serious revolution and some major push to have some extremely tough math chops to get there. It likely won't come from ML (who suffers similar issues of rigor), but maybe from neuroscience or plain old stats (econ surprisingly contributes, more to sociology though). My worry is that the slop has too much momentum and that criticism will be dismissed because it is viewed as saying that the researchers are lazy, dumb, or incompetent rather than the monumental difficulties that are natural to the field (though both may be true, and one can cause the other). But I do hope to see it. Especially as someone in ML. We can really see the need to pin down these concepts such as cognition, consciousness, intelligence, reasoning, emotions, desire, thinking, will, and so on. These are not remotely easy problems to solve. But it is easy to convince yourself that you do understand, as long as you stop asking why after a certain point.

And I do hope these conversations continue. Light is the best disinfectant. Science is about seeking truth, not answers. That often requires a lot of nuance, unfortunately. I know it will cause some to distrust science more, but I have the feeling they were already looking for reasons to.

He links to a meta analysis* that says CBT does cure depression and does so consistently for many decades without any declines in effectiveness. Later for some reason, he says no single mental illness was ever cured.

It seems the main point of the article is to say that nothing except "nudges" ever worked in psychology - this is nonsense that he himself contradicts as I mentioned above.

Skip this sensationalist guy, use https://scholar.google.com to do your own research

* https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/26037670/2017_C...

I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness).

Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets.

The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting.

A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.

In the U.S., many used to believe in God, his design, Righteousness, love, justice, strong, families, building on biological principles, like gender roles, and institutions reflecting these principles. Most believed we would be judged at the end of our life for how well we did those things. They believe we would be rewarded or punished. Building on these things kept paying off in spite of all the problems they came from the simple nature of humanity.

Overtime, the culture shifted to be godless, subjective, individualist, money, focused, pleasure, focused, anti-family, go against biological design, and so on. Doing the opposite of God’s design, unraveled its advantages while leading all sorts of problems. Was subjectivism over objective truth, we also can’t agree on solutions.

we also lost the supernatural advantage. If we repent and follow Jesus Christ, he puts the spirit of God in us. God spirit gives us an inner peace that persists even in bad circumstances. We learned that our suffering is constructive, if not caused by bad choices. We also learned to turn away from send which prevents much suffering in individuals and in society. God also hears our prayers whereby he may supernaturally change the circumstances of individual lives or the world itself. We call these events luck.

Outside of Christian counseling, psychologists and society have given these things up. They’ve given up the power that Jesus Christ provides to overcome things we can’t ordinarily overcome.

I also mentioned political activism. When liberal Atheist took over education, they started promoting ideas that are politically important to them, which didn’t have any science backing them up. If there’s a conflict, their politics always take priority over science. They tied their unproven solutions into those general concepts where you can’t argue with many of their methods more than the concept itself. So, they pick people who will promote these views, they’re baked into their “science,” and nobody sees contrary evidence. If the theories do damage, or are ineffective, the damage continues because their application is driven by political domination rather than the scientific method.

Examples include evolution as the origin of life, specific theories of man-made global warming, feminism, pro-homosexuality, gender as a construct, subjectivism, intersectionality/C.R.T.) modern Marxism), and so on.

So, psychology is failing because it’s built on the wrong foundations, powerless compared to having Christ plus counseling, and set up to fail by political activists whose desires come before the truth or others’ needs.

I think it comes down to the fact that both disciplines work with people and behaviour, and people are not homogeneous nor are behaviours easily predicted. For that reason, I think that a distinction can be made between “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” - we just can’t get the same level of precision that the hard sciences can, but that doesn’t mean that Psychology isn’t scientific. We still apply the scientific method to discover phenomena and develop testable theories, just like other sciences. And meta-analyses allow for much greater certainty in findings..

He assumed the human is a machine and used _analytical_ thinking trying to understand it.

Yet you think the interpretation of dreams is just BS. Either you only read secondary literature or you have a deficiency in reasoning.

As Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others have said, in the same way that chemistry replaced alchemy, neuroscience will replace psychology. But this isn't likely to happen soon -- the human brain is too complex for present-day efforts.

But there's some progress. In a recent breakthrough, we fully mapped the brain of a fruit fly (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y).

1. Debunk 'folk' psychology, with comparisons to the illegitimacy of 'folk' biology and 'folk' physics

2. Shake things up- meaning don't be afraid to question established dogma regardless of reputational risks

I, a completely unqualified internet commenter, will give number 2 a try. I'd argue that psychology is a folk science, which is to say its not a science at all, but an art. As we've recently discovered, a massive swath of psychological studies are non-reproducible. So maybe we shouldnt treat psychology as if it were a rigorous scientific pursuit, but a philosophical one, or even a therapeutic one (IE. make it synonymous with psychiatry). Leave the science to the neuroscientists, who can quantify and measure the things they're studying (I understand there is some overlap between these fields sometimes). If your study consists of asking people questions and treating their answers as quantitative measurements of anything, I don't know- it feels like something has been lost in the sauce there. Too many variables to draw any meaningful conclusions.