- An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong?
Because there are no scientists involved in psychology.
What a load of absolute garbage. One research paper doesn't debunk anything. Especially not when there are hundreds of other research papers indicating the opposite. Psychology is an incredibly useful field of research that has lead to some very important things. To dismiss it all because of one paper is laughable.
Odder already said most of what I would have, and put it a lot better than I could. I just find it strange that psychology seems to get this kind of response so much more than other sciences. Psychologists wouldn't be the first scientists to get something wrong. They wouldn't even be the first scientists to get a lot of things wrong. But how many people call physics "bunk" when a set of results can't be reproduced. We need to remember that mistakes within a field don't necessarily make that field invalid.
This is an old post that I was led to from another post. Whether the will power theory is debunked or not may not be answered, but the statement at the end struck me as more positive than the person making it. I've heard it said more than once that a sense of uncertainty is the place of discovery. This attitude might bode more positive for psychology than the idea that everything is concretely understood.If it’s not much fun for the people whose life’s work has been called into question, neither does it hearten skeptics in the field. “I’m in a dark place,” Inzlicht wrote on his blog earlier this week. “I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not.”
Even scientists fall victim to this all the time. Just go back and look at phrenology and crainiometry for a primer. I would agree that psychology is more prone, however. Ever since Pavlov and Watson, psychology has been trying to prove behaviorism is a thing (it's not). They keep changing the name, and trying to add layers of nuance, but a stinking pile of garbage by any other name... The most bothersome thing to me isn't these silly will power studies, but rather the whole new fields of "neuropsychology" and "behavioral neuroscience" that are getting so many billions of dollars and one press article after the next to espouse that which we know to be false (and have known since very shortly after Watson). Next week someone will come along and "prove" that the cookie-will-power theory is "correct" because they hooked the subjects up to an fMRI and their brains "lit up" every time they denied themselves a cookie. The truly sad thing isn't that there are no scientists doing psychology; it's that there are no requirements to have any kind of philosophical moorings to get into experimental science.
So, er, how do you propose studying the brain? Behavourism is bunk, brain imaging is bunk? If a brain area lights up consistently when you deny yourself something, that sounds like something is going on there, don't you think? If it was the prefrontal cortex, that would be exciting, actually. Screams cognitive control.The most bothersome thing to me isn't these silly will power studies, but rather the whole new fields of "neuropsychology" and "behavioral neuroscience" that are getting so many billions of dollars and one press article after the next to espouse that which we know to be false (and have known since very shortly after Watson). Next week someone will come along and "prove" that the cookie-will-power theory is "correct" because they hooked the subjects up to an fMRI and their brains "lit up" every time they denied themselves a cookie. The truly sad thing isn't that there are no scientists doing psychology; it's that there are no requirements to have any kind of philosophical moorings to get into experimental science.
Ya screw the mentally ill. Anybody with a real understanding of science wouldn't declare an entire field as bunk because people are questioning one theory. Do you have any idea how much shit scientist get wrong all the time in every field ? I guess they might as well all just pack up and go home. Christ I'm studying physical illnesses and the amount of them that are idiopathic is ridiculous. We don't know shit and I can't stand pseudointellects pretending like theories maybe being proven wrong somehow make scientists idiots. It makes them scientists.
Why do you say it's not? Behaviorism: That seems reasonable to me at a surface level, that one's environment and one's genetics dictate behavior... If anything it doesn't really say much in particular that's falsifiable...Ever since Pavlov and Watson, psychology has been trying to prove behaviorism is a thing (it's not).
It assumes that the behavior of a human or animal is a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Thus, although behaviorists generally accept the important role of inheritance in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental factors.
I'm not sure if I see your point... Define direct and causal? I question your assertion because I lack a general context for psychology, if we're going off of purely physical laws: some set of probabilistic rules dictated that viewing your message set off a chain of neurons firing that made me write a message in response. But maybe that's not what you're getting at...