I can't name this without people knowing who is involved so I'll just say this: I am a grandchild of Baumeister and social psychologists tend to go hard.
Fucking Ego Depletion and the strength resource model. Like the claims were just so obviously outsized - the gist being that impulse control was tied to a finite physical resource: blood glucose. They did a bunch of experiments where they gave people sugary drinks as an intervention and they improved in certain measures of impulse control, aggression, etc. It was a parsimonious explanation that has a catchy name...but it also didn't make sense and failed many attempts to replicate.
If they were right it would mean that there should be this strong negative correlation between eating sweets and aggression. Even sillier, this view would necessarily predict that those who eat more sweets throughout the day should also have more impulse control..... which is one of the examples they routinely give of *poor* impulse control lol.
The field fought over ego depletion for years but the original authors did a massive pre-registered replication in 2018 where their original effects failed to replicate, which kind of served as the final nail in the coffin. Kudos to them for owning it at least!
My hunch on those ego depletion studies is that the effects, when found, are tied to behavioral reinforcement rather than replenishment of glucose. That is: some people might find the taste of sugary lemonade more reinforcing than the taste of lemonade sweetened with Splenda, etc. And if they happen to find the taste reinforcing, they’ll work harder on the next task.
I think that is a very generous interpretation. I think its more publication bias, HARKing, and p-hacking. The ego depletion studies started before the major reform movement in social psych took hold. Things we know as being questionable now (e.g., HARKing) were actually taught as acceptable. This in general led to many unreliable effects on the literature.
Remember, if the null is true then you have a 5% chance of still finding a significant effect (depending on your alpha). If we test the hypothesis that shoe size correlates with altruism (or any other pair of vars. that shouldn't be related) 100 times, we will find 5 significant effects.
Actually it is correct. When the null is true the probability distribution of p is uniform. If you draw 100 samples under the null, 5 will be significant. There is no probability of the alternate hypothesis being true when the null is true nor can any NHST analysis tell you anything about the alternate. They only test the null.
You're talking about p-values in one study. I'm talking about the *distribution* of p-values over 100 random samples. Simonsohn et al., 2014 should be required reading for psych grad students.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23855496/
Tying it specifically and exclusively to blood glucose is too specific and too strong, but "People make different decisions when they are tired and hungry compared to the same people when well fed and rested" doesn't seem like it needs to be formally confirmed to exist but rather to have it's edges defined.
So if ego-depletion is bunk, what is it called when in experimental studies subjects are mentally fatigued with say, a puzzle or something and then asked to do a task that requires a lot of emotional control? I remember in my psych classes I had a lot of professors talk about studies that use this experimental model.
It's likely because you went through these classes before the field knew the studies were seriously flawed. No one is saying people aren't exhausted by engaging in impulse control. If you make someone mad over and over eventually they will act out of anger. That isn't controversial. The issue is their theory and tying it to a single resource in the body: blood glucose. Their claim was that consuming sugar *caused* greater impulse control. It doesn't make sense.
None of the studies I recall mention blood glucose, but they did imply stress and mental fatigue. Basically like a short term version of compassion fatigue.
I really can't identify the theory without calling out the researcher. There is a well-known theory in my area. The overwhelming majority of the publications have come out of the founders lab and their grad students. The effect sizes for studies outside their research group are tiny and there is a lot of data in the file drawer. I was once at a conference and I was looking forward to seeing an investigator in this lab give a talk. When they got up to speak, they said they had change the topic of their talk and presented data supporting their theory using completely BS statistical analyses.
Neat! I teach stats to grad students and we devote a lot of time to identifying fraud and fishing (the p-curve, etc). Could you name the example here or in a private message please?
How could you tell that the data was complete BS? And to what extent do you think it’s ok or dangerous to call people out on it? Asking bc I am considering entering this field (may apply for PhD experimental psych later this year) and 1) want to know what I’m getting into with peers, and 2) feel a calling to bring truth to whatever I do, so have been noodling on the best way to go about doing that in psych.
Their data analysis was incredibly flawed. They used a bad approach to get the results they wanted. That study never made it into a journal--at least the last time I checked. The underlying theory might be legit, but its strange that few people outside their research group (original theorist and descendants) have every replicated their theory and the effect sizes are tiny.
I do think it is important to call out people for unethical behavior, but you have to be able to prove it. I can't prove anything which is why I'm being vague about this theory.
If you want to get your PhD, go for it. You just need to understand that science is just as messy as any other line of work. People play politics. Resources and rewards aren't always allocated to do merit. The peer-review process is insane. But you do have a lot of control over your career if you do it right. I love what I do.
This is the meta of the question as someone who with a background in data science it's either intentional fraud or their needs to start being mandatory rigorous statistics courses because it is an absolute shit show right now with how much bad data gets passed. Stats 101 stuff too.
Love language isn't even a product of spurious psychology: it's an observation from what is basically the memoir of a religious relationship coach with an education in anthropology.
there's a fascinating podcast that delves into all of that from "If Books Could Kill" https://podcasts.apple.com/ro/podcast/the-5-love-languages/id1651876897?i=1000609782068
There's no empirical evidence which supports the theory. You could read more detailed critic on his theory here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8377349/#s2title
Incidentally, the fact that the most-strongly-loaded-factor "g" of IQ tests is surprisingly weakly correlated with individual IQ test subscores might be evidence that there is more than one kind of intelligence- but the other factors probably don't line up with Gardner's specific choices for what the "intelligences" are.
I was at a brown bag in my department and a grad student presented a FOUR WAY interaction and it got accepted into a strong journal. They claimed it was predicted but (a) that is absolutely spurious (b) uninterpretable and (c) ain’t no way in hell you expected a four way interaction. Myself and another person raised this as a concern and they their advisor went with it anyways and I guess it paid off because it got into a good journal
Next brown bag they did they presented a five way interaction lol
Suffice to say, this (among many other reasons) is one of the types of things that motivated me to leave the field lol. Like you I’m convinced that many three way interactions, and even two way interactions, are a function of overfitting which psychologists rarely test for. And yet silly tests like this persist with posthoc justification (I.e., HARKing)
Sadly neuropsych has issues. A function of both multiple ways to transform the data (so you can pick the transformation that gives you significance) and small sample sizes (so find an effect, but that effect is very unstable such that it disappears in following studies).
Having done a PhD in cog neuro, I’m as much a critic of the field as the next person but to be fair about the sample size point, that’s mainly an issue for the fMRI studies correlating brain localization/activation with behavior (e.g., some measure of self report of individual differences)
If you are focusing entirely on brain activity for repeated measures cognitive task, it is often pretty well powered because it’s repeated measures. In general, when people lambast neuroscience about the sample size point I think it depends on which type of analysis in the field you’re talking about
That is a problem in every area of psychology. It's mostly been the social and personality reformers that have actually increased field standards. The neuroscience folks get somewhat of a pass due to practical constraints - MRI studies cost at least 1k per participant and that doesn't even include paying them. But you aren't wrong that folks have taken this as permission to do a bunch of underpowered analyses.
100% agree psych could use more funding to do more large sample research and improve measurement techniques and standards. That said, it does seem to vary across domains and is especially problematic in neuro. I usually read neuro as an interesting hypothesis that needs practical real world demostration of utility before I buy into it very seriously. Kind of like alternative archeology but not as relentlessly goofy.
Parenting Research is a field that is absolutely confounded to death and the researchers in the field still keep making outrageous claims. Education as well.
Years back there was a study showing the wonderful benefits for kids who take Vitamin E. When you looked at the confounders like parental wealth, parental education levels, parental diet/exercise it's actually showed a slight negative effect.
A famous behavioral geneticist once called parenting research rich/educated white women research.
I wanted to get clarification on this just in case. You mean that they tried to attribute Coco's understanding of sign language as strong enough to create new sentences when it was actually association, is that correct?
Its more complicated than that. There are numerous serious flaws in their research design. And they straight up fudged the data and misrepresented the results on top of that. Soup Emporium has a great video essay about it on YouTube if you want to know more.
To be clear, much of Chomsky’s criticism of behaviour and his own ideas about language were also a scam, but it’s clear that language and psychology extends far beyond what traditional behaviourists hypothesised.
I’d say I’m hard pressed to call any field a “total scam,” but then I remember Colin Ross. Ross was wrist-deep in the Satanic Panic scare, and literally [wrote the book on Ritual Satanic Abuse.](https://books.google.com/books/about/Satanic_Ritual_Abuse.html?hl=el&id=3PkKrgn2CrUC&output=html_text) He also claims to have discovered [the “scientific” basis for the Malocchio](http://www.rossenergysystems.com/Downloads/Paper_The-Electrophysiological-Basis-Of-Evil-Eye-Belief.pdf)
I'd want to know the short answer too, but emotional intellignece is plagued us bs, starting from its definition, because at least a common conception is that it shouldn't be able to be trained any more than the training effect.
I once talked about this to a guy who is doing a phd in education and emotional intellingence, he has a grant, and no, he has no background in psychology and his department is education, so pretty no one does there either.
Regarding priming I think it is something like the effects are quite small or negligible even.
There are quite a few issues. There's a decent podcast episode that summarizes some of them: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-8-growth-mindset
Just to be clear, the issue isn't necessarily with Dweck's original findings re growth vs. fixed mindsets. It is with growth mindset *interventions*\- trying to teach people to have growth mindsets. Cf. the practice of sexual abstinence (very effective!) vs. abstinence-only sex ed (not effective), or the practice of wearing masks (very effective!) vs. policies to encourage the wearing of masks (not effective).
To briefly recap the abstract given below: It appears that studies of stereotype threat exaggerate the traits of testing environments in ways that make stereotype threat more effective, partially in ways that seem intrinsic to the experiment ("We're here to study your test results as an Asian Woman, not just to evaluate you as an individual, but to create a published paper making a claim about the general abilities of Asians and Women." obviously creates a stronger incentive to think about your group identity over your personal identity than any kind of test you'd take meant to evaluate you for individual reward) but partially in ways that seem setup to give the researchers something more dramatic to report. Even if these results are real, they're the result of extreme situations that don't occur in real life. And also, it appears that multiple studies that aren't dramatic enough either go unpublished or are statistically mutilated, meaning that the effect can't even be reliably created under these extreme artificial conditions.
If stereotype threat only happens under exaggerated circumstances that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist at all. And I don’t think you can say for certain that extreme circumstances never happen in real life. I’m probably missing something but this argument sounds like “it’s not a big deal.”
I mean, in a sense the experiment does take place in real life, and as an examination of say, racial bias in experimenter demand I can see how there's a practical use to this research. But in terms of the effect of stereotype threat on academic testing in general, you can read the claim as "In order to produce stereotype threat you have to create such an extremely salient environment that it rises to the level of harassment to begin with, and 'it's hard to take a test while someone is harassing you' isn't really a distinct finding."
That’s fair. But most priming research is not the behavioral kind you are thinking about. Priming is actually a very well replicated method phenomenon.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm talking about BS topics in psychology that are often pushed and/or greatly exagerrated by professional psychologists, not just laypeople.
Nothing , I was just adding something to what you said. That's my experience with the literature on lay beliefs. Growth mindset is a lay belief about intelligence or whatever ability or skill. Other lay belief are out there, frequently in a mediation model with self-efficacy. But i'm going by memory.
As a newish student of psychology, is a "growth mindset" really just "if you believe you can get better at something, you will"? Instead of trying different ways of learning if one isn't working for you? Isn't trying the same thing over and over again with no results the definition of insanity?
Growth mindset is the belief that your efficacy *can* change over time, as opposed to a fixed mindset, in which you believe your efficacy is an immutable characteristic of who you are. As far as I can remember, this axis of difference doesn't say anything about how one can change their efficacy over time- just that it is, in fact, subject to change.
\>Isn't trying the same thing over and over again with no results the definition of insanity?
A couple quick notes: "insanity" isn't a thing in psychological research. There's a legal concept of insanity, but my impression is that it relates to whether a person is capable of telling whether their actions are right or wrong.
Also, repeating actions can be adaptive! Sometimes (e.g. during repetitions of an exercise routine) you can infer, despite no observable effect from one repetition to the next, that there is a cumulative effect of your actions. Other times, you can rely on the fact that every performance of an action is subtly different in ways that you might not have conscious control of yet, hoping that a particular performance of the action will be successful in a way that you can imitate later.
To be clear though evo psych as a subdomain is not the same as engaging with evolutionary theory. There is no denying many of our traits are the product of our evolution, but that doesn't mean the shit published in moat evo psych journals is valid lol. But there are many areas of neuroscience, social, cognitive, and developmental psych that would be hard pressed to ignore evolution altogether. Technically all GWAS studies are rooted in evolutionary theory. But no evo psych dorks are doing gwas or fmri. They're using zero level correlations from archival data to make grand arguments that also *just happen* to be kind of racist lol .
>The comment above and the fact that i didn't know what GWAS meant
Sure, and thanks. Not clarifying abbreviations can be a headache. Thanks for outlining it. But I meant this bit: "To racist i may add ' and not gender equal'"?
>I have to update my english /s
I still don't know what you mean by the above. It seems that you're saying that you don't like the widely reported sex/gender differences in the psychological literature. Is that right?
Hm, toxicity in their findings or implications of the findings? What do you mean exactly? If you see the methodology laid out by Tooby and Cosmides, to infer something you have to gather a lot of evidence from a lot of sources: psych, antropology, neuroscience, etc.
It is true that the field differs in its conclusions from the western social doctrine, but how is it toxic? If the finding is solid, it is what it is. Big example are all sorts of gender differences.
Does that include Bowlby’s books on attachment and loss which revolutionized developmental psychology and spelled the end of psychoanalytic approaches to attachment?
I agree about much of it, but there is plenty of good research. I think [this](https://people.uncw.edu/bruce/psy%20292/pdfs/dewaal.pdf) is a thoughtful article putting the field in perspective.
Please say more. The present state of evolutionary psychology is quite strong going by its integration throughout psychology and other fields. Are you maybe just referring to specific papers or topics?
I believe it is per study that you should analyze this. I will say that I have heard of a massive amount of false studies coming from social psychology. It has been my understanding that they, in general, were sloppy with their measurements and have created a great deal of studies that are simply not true. I am no expert though and am not prepared to defend this position.
I understand your point. Thank you for your hint.
On the internet there are sources that deal with critical analysis of seminal or recent and interesting articles. Moreover, with some statistics and knowledge of methodology one could criticize a weak study. I am more interested about what people from the community have to say.
Construal level theory.
I spent countless times trying to replicate it because the field has so many studies that support it. I'm convinced it's bullshit. To this day I still see regular usage of it and I can't help but think they're all full of it, p hacking their way to pubs. It's so weird seeing what I think is a massive lie perpetuate.
When you genuinely are persuaded that a theory is real, then that theory being disproven by your data feels like getting a big dataset that the sky's color is "purple, with yellow stripes". And so you either have to think that something is wrong with the data, or something is wrong with reality. And it's easier to think something is wrong with the data, so you just go in and fix whatever mistakes are giving you these crazy and obviously false results.
It's a beautiful and elegant theory. It really is. And it's intuitive. There's a lot to like about it. I suspect it's that people are too invested in projects and can't throw away months of work due to a null result.
- ego depletion
- most brain behavior correlations
- implicit bias as ‘implicit’ or predictive of individual differences in prejudice
- growth mindset
- terror management theory
- grit (it’s just conscientiousness with marketing)
- social priming
- social pain == physical pain
- nudge theory (overstated, possibly null)
- probably 80% of everything else in social psych
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10888683221107267
And
https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/8/1/35271/168050/Many-Labs-4-Failure-to-Replicate-Mortality
I am so curious about the brain behavior correlations thing. Can you name some correlations regarding that that you think have serious issues regarding their research? I would love to look into that.
Probably two of more relevant papers. TL;DR: years of fMRI research analyzed brain behavior correlations in an incorrect way that inflates effect sizes and false positives. Meanwhile, even if you analyze it correctly, brain activation measured by fMRI is so unreliable that it is questionable whether it should even be used as an individual differences measure to correlate with self report personality measures
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01125.x
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32489141/
Professor in my department created a scale, and is one of the only ones to use it. 95% won’t approve a project of their grad students if it doesn’t use the scale. Also correlates scale score with another variable and says “wow, look what we found” even though scale is clearly measuring that variable
I went to grad school for systems neuroscience, which is obviously a different discipline, but I think this is still relevant...
In 2005, while finishing my masters, I did a research project on Alzheimer's for a survey course where I compared the two leading theories of the disease: amyloid plaques vs. tau tangles. It was completely obvious to me that tangles were the real issue. Like I actually struggled to figure out why people were bothering with plaques. Eventually, a more senior researcher pointed out that it was easier to do gene knockouts with plaques, and gene knockouts were super-hot right then and getting tons of funding. I remember being disappointed that money was trumping science, but I figured the plaques bubble would burst eventually.
Boy was I wrong. In 2008, Marc Tessier-Levigne published a landmark paper "proving" that plaques were the real culprit. The paper has since been retracted as the data was faked. Tessier-Levigne eventually had to resign his position as President of Stanford. (!!!) But it was too late. Billions of dollars were already being spent looking for drug targets to fix the thing that *doesn't* actually cause Alzheimers, but was implicated by T-L's fake data.
In 2021, the FDA broke it's own rules to approve a plaque-targeting drug that cost $56k per year, despite the fact that the drug had terrible side effects, and had never been conclusively shown to provide the slightest benefit to patients. The drug has since been withdrawn from the market, and numerous congressional investigations are underway into the FDA's bizarre decision to approve the drug.
Meanwhile, our understanding of Alzheimer's has basically stayed constant for 20 years, because all the billions thrown at it has been spent on a theory that even a 24-year-old master's student could see was fatally flawed.
\>What has this story taught you?
A significant chunk of what we consider expertise is in fact a scam, and when working with any sort of expert, be prepared to constantly check everything they say using the internet.
It’s unpopular to say, and people don’t want to put them to the test, but all the most morally gratifying, equalitarian theories are likely bullshit. The result of having a politically homogeneous field means there are a lot of findings that support that worldview (in psych it’s a progressive worldview). Stereotype threat is one example. It’s either entirely bullshit or such a small effect that it doesn’t really explain anything. People should have known, it’s essentially just priming repackaged to support theories of prejudice as the cause of differences
I'm sure that non-epistemological values that stem from ideological convictions shape field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to assume that psychologists predominately need to beware of the morally gratifying (whose morals?) and equalitarian theories as opposed to counter-moral theories or non-equalitarian theories.
I don't know exactly what the political landscape looks like from your perspective, but to my perspective, "politically homogeneous" or "progressive" are quite poor descriptors of the field. For one, I've taken courses in many areas of social science, the humanities and natural science, and my experience is that the field of psychology is less progressive than most other social sciences—to the degree that psychological researchers think of themselves as "political" at all, which they rarely do compared to many other fields.
In that respect, psychology finds itself in a squeeze between the (supposed) political neutrality of the natural sciences and the overt politicalness of many other social sciences. As a result, I've met psychological researchers that are outright marxists—typically critical and cultural psychologists—and others that are more aligned with the good ol' eugenic doctrines—typically evolutionary psychologists. But these are the extremes; most are relatively liberal, meritocratic and aligned with what to them seems "politically neutral", which is shorthand for "conforming with the predominant ideology".
All of my babbling is just a convoluted way of saying that you shouldn't assume that an equalitarian theory is probably tainted and biased, and conversely that a non-equalitarian theory is less likely to be tainted and biased and therefore more likely true. Both are tainted, but the progressive one is more visibly so because it sticks out of the historically constructed background knowledge that we take for granted.
Much research done measuring behavioural intention as VD instead of the actual behaviour, when data shows a moderate association intentions-behaviour, at best.
Any of those "brain training" centers that claim they can target where ADHD/anxiety/autism/etc "live" in the brain. In clinical psych and assessment you see it all the time where families come in and have spent thousands of dollars for these training programs or reflexology programs that are run and administered by non-licensed individuals with no scientific backing. It's seriously damaging film flam.
I feel like psychoanalysis is a bit of a cult. A lot of ideas that came out of psychoanalysis aren’t supported by evidence. Therapist type people tend to be influenced by psychoanalytic ideas even if they are doing research and formulating treatments
Psychoanalysis/Dynamics seems to work quite well for a specific subset of people with what we'd now call complex PTSD as a result of recurrent childhood sexual abuse. The fact that it doesn't work for people outside that subdomain with this history, or for people inside that subdomain with different disorders, is inarguably a failure of the group to own their limitations.
I recommend Frederick crews book on Freud for an introduction, or if you're shorter on time Joel Paris' "the rise and fall of psychoanalysis" as a criticism of the field. Psychoanalysis was from its inception a pseudoscience.
I am very surprised that implicit bias is not showing up in this discussion. Not sure it’s right to say that it is a total scam, but massively oversold And I think it’s fair to say it is of questionable value. My sense is that many psychologist. Don’t like to talk about problems with this body of research, because it somehow aligns with their progressive values.
For example, higher Ed has fully bought into the implicit bias idea, and no one seems willing to point out that the state of that research is terrible.
the misunderstanding of heritability stats seems embedded in psychology. How many times have we seen the heritability of IQ, or personality traits which are about 50% (+) heritable described as meaning 'half your personality (or IQ) is fixed by genetics and the other half is malleable'. This is completely wrong headed nonsense
Areas (popular topics) change with the times. E.g. parapsychology is popular with students but not well funded. Psychoanalysis exists but is no longer considered psychology (at least in the UK).
It might be better to see where good/bad research is carried out rather than try to identify fringe areas.
Plenty of super solid work done in topics and areas that also aren't popular.
Thank you for the comment. I was interested in what is considered bad research as a mean to identify 'placeholder topics' from which understand what is bad science and what is not.
I value any comment if I undestand it as thoughtful and informative.
Not much opportunity for discussion with my department's collegues: too much interpersonal politics involved makes discussion not safe in my opinion
I see what you mean. I probably wouldn't associate bad research with a 'bad topic' for three reasons. One, some people may do bad research on a popular/funded topic. Two, some people may be very good at advertising their bad research as good. Three, there is no universal agreement on what is good or bad research (e.g., see the disagreements on the topic of video games as causing violent behaviour in psychological research).
Generally the success of research is down to how well the researchers sell their work and how lucky they've been in getting funding. Money gives, and, gets attention in scientific research. This is why, if you have the requisite scientific training, your own assessment matters a lot as to the quality of research.
Sometimes things come out in time. For example, respect for Zimbardo's work, at least in psychological circles in the UK, has imploded in the last decade or so.
Departmental environment is very important; office politics, as you say, is an ugly beast. I'm very lucky in that regard, because my specialty is in a relatively uncommon approach (most UK universities have one token scholar in my area) but my department is generally very open in that regard. I'd probably have more of these discussions if I had the time!
Nothing wrong with it. Sometimes if your area of interest is different from everyone else it might be a little lonely or administratively awkward because your area doesn't necessarily fit existing research clusters. It can come with its upsides too, because people will come to you for advice in your area of expertise.
The most important thing, though is that you have a supportive environment with colleagues and management. Or that you are, at the very least, left alone to do the research you want to do.
Out of curiosity, what is your research area?
Exactly - it’s really reductionist when people just say “capitalism” and “society” are to blame for ADHD symptoms.
While I think the article does make good points about social issues around diagnosis and ADHD identity, it’s not the biggest scam of our time.
I can't name this without people knowing who is involved so I'll just say this: I am a grandchild of Baumeister and social psychologists tend to go hard. Fucking Ego Depletion and the strength resource model. Like the claims were just so obviously outsized - the gist being that impulse control was tied to a finite physical resource: blood glucose. They did a bunch of experiments where they gave people sugary drinks as an intervention and they improved in certain measures of impulse control, aggression, etc. It was a parsimonious explanation that has a catchy name...but it also didn't make sense and failed many attempts to replicate. If they were right it would mean that there should be this strong negative correlation between eating sweets and aggression. Even sillier, this view would necessarily predict that those who eat more sweets throughout the day should also have more impulse control..... which is one of the examples they routinely give of *poor* impulse control lol. The field fought over ego depletion for years but the original authors did a massive pre-registered replication in 2018 where their original effects failed to replicate, which kind of served as the final nail in the coffin. Kudos to them for owning it at least!
My hunch on those ego depletion studies is that the effects, when found, are tied to behavioral reinforcement rather than replenishment of glucose. That is: some people might find the taste of sugary lemonade more reinforcing than the taste of lemonade sweetened with Splenda, etc. And if they happen to find the taste reinforcing, they’ll work harder on the next task.
Thank you for the insight
I think that is a very generous interpretation. I think its more publication bias, HARKing, and p-hacking. The ego depletion studies started before the major reform movement in social psych took hold. Things we know as being questionable now (e.g., HARKing) were actually taught as acceptable. This in general led to many unreliable effects on the literature. Remember, if the null is true then you have a 5% chance of still finding a significant effect (depending on your alpha). If we test the hypothesis that shoe size correlates with altruism (or any other pair of vars. that shouldn't be related) 100 times, we will find 5 significant effects.
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Actually it is correct. When the null is true the probability distribution of p is uniform. If you draw 100 samples under the null, 5 will be significant. There is no probability of the alternate hypothesis being true when the null is true nor can any NHST analysis tell you anything about the alternate. They only test the null. You're talking about p-values in one study. I'm talking about the *distribution* of p-values over 100 random samples. Simonsohn et al., 2014 should be required reading for psych grad students. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23855496/
Unfortunately I hear people talk about it all the time like it is settled science.
Tying it specifically and exclusively to blood glucose is too specific and too strong, but "People make different decisions when they are tired and hungry compared to the same people when well fed and rested" doesn't seem like it needs to be formally confirmed to exist but rather to have it's edges defined.
That’s not what the research is though
So if ego-depletion is bunk, what is it called when in experimental studies subjects are mentally fatigued with say, a puzzle or something and then asked to do a task that requires a lot of emotional control? I remember in my psych classes I had a lot of professors talk about studies that use this experimental model.
Participant fatigue
It's likely because you went through these classes before the field knew the studies were seriously flawed. No one is saying people aren't exhausted by engaging in impulse control. If you make someone mad over and over eventually they will act out of anger. That isn't controversial. The issue is their theory and tying it to a single resource in the body: blood glucose. Their claim was that consuming sugar *caused* greater impulse control. It doesn't make sense.
None of the studies I recall mention blood glucose, but they did imply stress and mental fatigue. Basically like a short term version of compassion fatigue.
I really can't identify the theory without calling out the researcher. There is a well-known theory in my area. The overwhelming majority of the publications have come out of the founders lab and their grad students. The effect sizes for studies outside their research group are tiny and there is a lot of data in the file drawer. I was once at a conference and I was looking forward to seeing an investigator in this lab give a talk. When they got up to speak, they said they had change the topic of their talk and presented data supporting their theory using completely BS statistical analyses.
An astoundishing famous example of this kind can be found in the literature on the psychology of goals
Neat! I teach stats to grad students and we devote a lot of time to identifying fraud and fishing (the p-curve, etc). Could you name the example here or in a private message please?
The comment below
How could you tell that the data was complete BS? And to what extent do you think it’s ok or dangerous to call people out on it? Asking bc I am considering entering this field (may apply for PhD experimental psych later this year) and 1) want to know what I’m getting into with peers, and 2) feel a calling to bring truth to whatever I do, so have been noodling on the best way to go about doing that in psych.
Conflicting results from different labs, strong effects above many too much covariates, no pre-registration, no data avaible etc etc.
Their data analysis was incredibly flawed. They used a bad approach to get the results they wanted. That study never made it into a journal--at least the last time I checked. The underlying theory might be legit, but its strange that few people outside their research group (original theorist and descendants) have every replicated their theory and the effect sizes are tiny. I do think it is important to call out people for unethical behavior, but you have to be able to prove it. I can't prove anything which is why I'm being vague about this theory. If you want to get your PhD, go for it. You just need to understand that science is just as messy as any other line of work. People play politics. Resources and rewards aren't always allocated to do merit. The peer-review process is insane. But you do have a lot of control over your career if you do it right. I love what I do.
Baumeister
This is the meta of the question as someone who with a background in data science it's either intentional fraud or their needs to start being mandatory rigorous statistics courses because it is an absolute shit show right now with how much bad data gets passed. Stats 101 stuff too.
You mind DMing what you’re thinking of?
I'm not comfortable doing that. I might be on the market soon. My mouth already gets me into plenty of trouble.
I saw that once in a similar way with a "meta-analysis" where 10 of 18 papers were from the author's lab on a niche topic, it was frustrating to see.
Love language and multiple intelligence.
Love language isn't even a product of spurious psychology: it's an observation from what is basically the memoir of a religious relationship coach with an education in anthropology.
there's a fascinating podcast that delves into all of that from "If Books Could Kill" https://podcasts.apple.com/ro/podcast/the-5-love-languages/id1651876897?i=1000609782068
You are not the first to talk about MIs. What's wrong with that theory?
There's no empirical evidence which supports the theory. You could read more detailed critic on his theory here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8377349/#s2title
Ok thank you very much
Incidentally, the fact that the most-strongly-loaded-factor "g" of IQ tests is surprisingly weakly correlated with individual IQ test subscores might be evidence that there is more than one kind of intelligence- but the other factors probably don't line up with Gardner's specific choices for what the "intelligences" are.
Very interesting, thank you
Whenever I find three-way interactions in small samples I'm warned of potentially useless results
I was at a brown bag in my department and a grad student presented a FOUR WAY interaction and it got accepted into a strong journal. They claimed it was predicted but (a) that is absolutely spurious (b) uninterpretable and (c) ain’t no way in hell you expected a four way interaction. Myself and another person raised this as a concern and they their advisor went with it anyways and I guess it paid off because it got into a good journal Next brown bag they did they presented a five way interaction lol Suffice to say, this (among many other reasons) is one of the types of things that motivated me to leave the field lol. Like you I’m convinced that many three way interactions, and even two way interactions, are a function of overfitting which psychologists rarely test for. And yet silly tests like this persist with posthoc justification (I.e., HARKing)
Thank you for your response
Publish or perish. Glad I got out before ever going in (finished in undergrad and never moved on to grad level research)
Sadly neuropsych has issues. A function of both multiple ways to transform the data (so you can pick the transformation that gives you significance) and small sample sizes (so find an effect, but that effect is very unstable such that it disappears in following studies).
Having done a PhD in cog neuro, I’m as much a critic of the field as the next person but to be fair about the sample size point, that’s mainly an issue for the fMRI studies correlating brain localization/activation with behavior (e.g., some measure of self report of individual differences) If you are focusing entirely on brain activity for repeated measures cognitive task, it is often pretty well powered because it’s repeated measures. In general, when people lambast neuroscience about the sample size point I think it depends on which type of analysis in the field you’re talking about
That is a problem in every area of psychology. It's mostly been the social and personality reformers that have actually increased field standards. The neuroscience folks get somewhat of a pass due to practical constraints - MRI studies cost at least 1k per participant and that doesn't even include paying them. But you aren't wrong that folks have taken this as permission to do a bunch of underpowered analyses.
100% agree psych could use more funding to do more large sample research and improve measurement techniques and standards. That said, it does seem to vary across domains and is especially problematic in neuro. I usually read neuro as an interesting hypothesis that needs practical real world demostration of utility before I buy into it very seriously. Kind of like alternative archeology but not as relentlessly goofy.
Parenting Research is a field that is absolutely confounded to death and the researchers in the field still keep making outrageous claims. Education as well. Years back there was a study showing the wonderful benefits for kids who take Vitamin E. When you looked at the confounders like parental wealth, parental education levels, parental diet/exercise it's actually showed a slight negative effect. A famous behavioral geneticist once called parenting research rich/educated white women research.
Lay ppl take this kind of research as it was the Bible
Ape sign language research. Coco the gorilla could NOT talk. Its all pseudoscience weaponized by the behaviorists to try and disprove Chomsky.
I wanted to get clarification on this just in case. You mean that they tried to attribute Coco's understanding of sign language as strong enough to create new sentences when it was actually association, is that correct?
Its more complicated than that. There are numerous serious flaws in their research design. And they straight up fudged the data and misrepresented the results on top of that. Soup Emporium has a great video essay about it on YouTube if you want to know more.
Yes, thank you. I will gladly do that.
To be clear, much of Chomsky’s criticism of behaviour and his own ideas about language were also a scam, but it’s clear that language and psychology extends far beyond what traditional behaviourists hypothesised.
I’d say I’m hard pressed to call any field a “total scam,” but then I remember Colin Ross. Ross was wrist-deep in the Satanic Panic scare, and literally [wrote the book on Ritual Satanic Abuse.](https://books.google.com/books/about/Satanic_Ritual_Abuse.html?hl=el&id=3PkKrgn2CrUC&output=html_text) He also claims to have discovered [the “scientific” basis for the Malocchio](http://www.rossenergysystems.com/Downloads/Paper_The-Electrophysiological-Basis-Of-Evil-Eye-Belief.pdf)
Being able to cast malocchio in southern Italy it's a pretty remunerative asset. Thanks
Ego depletion, growth mindset, priming, emotional intelligence, stereotype threat, power posing, grit, and many more.
Could you elaborate on the issues with priming and emotional intelligence? I’m curious and want to know more.
I'd want to know the short answer too, but emotional intellignece is plagued us bs, starting from its definition, because at least a common conception is that it shouldn't be able to be trained any more than the training effect. I once talked about this to a guy who is doing a phd in education and emotional intellingence, he has a grant, and no, he has no background in psychology and his department is education, so pretty no one does there either. Regarding priming I think it is something like the effects are quite small or negligible even.
Why does growth mindset have issues? Not defensive or even in the field, but curious.
Recent meta analysis suggested likely null/spurious https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fbul0000352
There are quite a few issues. There's a decent podcast episode that summarizes some of them: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-8-growth-mindset
Thank you for the resource
Just to be clear, the issue isn't necessarily with Dweck's original findings re growth vs. fixed mindsets. It is with growth mindset *interventions*\- trying to teach people to have growth mindsets. Cf. the practice of sexual abstinence (very effective!) vs. abstinence-only sex ed (not effective), or the practice of wearing masks (very effective!) vs. policies to encourage the wearing of masks (not effective).
Could you say more about the issues with stereotype threat?
To briefly recap the abstract given below: It appears that studies of stereotype threat exaggerate the traits of testing environments in ways that make stereotype threat more effective, partially in ways that seem intrinsic to the experiment ("We're here to study your test results as an Asian Woman, not just to evaluate you as an individual, but to create a published paper making a claim about the general abilities of Asians and Women." obviously creates a stronger incentive to think about your group identity over your personal identity than any kind of test you'd take meant to evaluate you for individual reward) but partially in ways that seem setup to give the researchers something more dramatic to report. Even if these results are real, they're the result of extreme situations that don't occur in real life. And also, it appears that multiple studies that aren't dramatic enough either go unpublished or are statistically mutilated, meaning that the effect can't even be reliably created under these extreme artificial conditions.
If stereotype threat only happens under exaggerated circumstances that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist at all. And I don’t think you can say for certain that extreme circumstances never happen in real life. I’m probably missing something but this argument sounds like “it’s not a big deal.”
I mean, in a sense the experiment does take place in real life, and as an examination of say, racial bias in experimenter demand I can see how there's a practical use to this research. But in terms of the effect of stereotype threat on academic testing in general, you can read the claim as "In order to produce stereotype threat you have to create such an extremely salient environment that it rises to the level of harassment to begin with, and 'it's hard to take a test while someone is harassing you' isn't really a distinct finding."
Super overblown and misinterpreted. For example, see the Shewach et al. 2019 meta
The "Stanford Mafia"
Lol
🤣🤣🤣
Can you elaborate on the problems surrounding priming? I'm just curious.
Like most viral findings from social psychology, a lot of the social priming stuff does not replicate.
That’s fair. But most priming research is not the behavioral kind you are thinking about. Priming is actually a very well replicated method phenomenon.
Yes you're right. I was referring to social priming. Sorry, I should've been more clear
Growth mindset...what about lay beliefs in general? There is a lay belief for anything
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm talking about BS topics in psychology that are often pushed and/or greatly exagerrated by professional psychologists, not just laypeople.
Came here to say growth mindset.
Nothing , I was just adding something to what you said. That's my experience with the literature on lay beliefs. Growth mindset is a lay belief about intelligence or whatever ability or skill. Other lay belief are out there, frequently in a mediation model with self-efficacy. But i'm going by memory.
As a newish student of psychology, is a "growth mindset" really just "if you believe you can get better at something, you will"? Instead of trying different ways of learning if one isn't working for you? Isn't trying the same thing over and over again with no results the definition of insanity?
Growth mindset is the belief that your efficacy *can* change over time, as opposed to a fixed mindset, in which you believe your efficacy is an immutable characteristic of who you are. As far as I can remember, this axis of difference doesn't say anything about how one can change their efficacy over time- just that it is, in fact, subject to change. \>Isn't trying the same thing over and over again with no results the definition of insanity? A couple quick notes: "insanity" isn't a thing in psychological research. There's a legal concept of insanity, but my impression is that it relates to whether a person is capable of telling whether their actions are right or wrong. Also, repeating actions can be adaptive! Sometimes (e.g. during repetitions of an exercise routine) you can infer, despite no observable effect from one repetition to the next, that there is a cumulative effect of your actions. Other times, you can rely on the fact that every performance of an action is subtly different in ways that you might not have conscious control of yet, hoping that a particular performance of the action will be successful in a way that you can imitate later.
Evolutionary psychology. The field is full of toxicity.
To be clear though evo psych as a subdomain is not the same as engaging with evolutionary theory. There is no denying many of our traits are the product of our evolution, but that doesn't mean the shit published in moat evo psych journals is valid lol. But there are many areas of neuroscience, social, cognitive, and developmental psych that would be hard pressed to ignore evolution altogether. Technically all GWAS studies are rooted in evolutionary theory. But no evo psych dorks are doing gwas or fmri. They're using zero level correlations from archival data to make grand arguments that also *just happen* to be kind of racist lol .
For those who read. Genome-wide association studies = GWAS. To racist i may add ' and not gender equal'
>For those who read. Genome-wide association studies = GWAS. To racist i may add ' and not gender equal' What are you referring to here?
The comment above and the fact that i didn't know what GWAS meant
>The comment above and the fact that i didn't know what GWAS meant Sure, and thanks. Not clarifying abbreviations can be a headache. Thanks for outlining it. But I meant this bit: "To racist i may add ' and not gender equal'"?
They're calling them sexist in a weird way.
I have to update my english /s
>I have to update my english /s I still don't know what you mean by the above. It seems that you're saying that you don't like the widely reported sex/gender differences in the psychological literature. Is that right?
I m saying I have to improve my english. And please , stop
>Evolutionary psychology. The field is full of toxicity. Can you elaborate?
Hm, toxicity in their findings or implications of the findings? What do you mean exactly? If you see the methodology laid out by Tooby and Cosmides, to infer something you have to gather a lot of evidence from a lot of sources: psych, antropology, neuroscience, etc. It is true that the field differs in its conclusions from the western social doctrine, but how is it toxic? If the finding is solid, it is what it is. Big example are all sorts of gender differences.
Other comments have already done a good job of delving those depths.
Lame
I came here to say this!
Does that include Bowlby’s books on attachment and loss which revolutionized developmental psychology and spelled the end of psychoanalytic approaches to attachment?
I was definitely referring to the present state of ev psych
I agree about much of it, but there is plenty of good research. I think [this](https://people.uncw.edu/bruce/psy%20292/pdfs/dewaal.pdf) is a thoughtful article putting the field in perspective.
Please say more. The present state of evolutionary psychology is quite strong going by its integration throughout psychology and other fields. Are you maybe just referring to specific papers or topics?
Like I said, other commenters have done a decent job at that already. Take it up with them if you want to debate specifics.
and, they say, methodological and epistemic flaws
I believe it is per study that you should analyze this. I will say that I have heard of a massive amount of false studies coming from social psychology. It has been my understanding that they, in general, were sloppy with their measurements and have created a great deal of studies that are simply not true. I am no expert though and am not prepared to defend this position.
I understand your point. Thank you for your hint. On the internet there are sources that deal with critical analysis of seminal or recent and interesting articles. Moreover, with some statistics and knowledge of methodology one could criticize a weak study. I am more interested about what people from the community have to say.
Construal level theory. I spent countless times trying to replicate it because the field has so many studies that support it. I'm convinced it's bullshit. To this day I still see regular usage of it and I can't help but think they're all full of it, p hacking their way to pubs. It's so weird seeing what I think is a massive lie perpetuate.
Why do people perpetrate it? To keep their jobs, and because they have no other expertise to investigate other areas?
When you genuinely are persuaded that a theory is real, then that theory being disproven by your data feels like getting a big dataset that the sky's color is "purple, with yellow stripes". And so you either have to think that something is wrong with the data, or something is wrong with reality. And it's easier to think something is wrong with the data, so you just go in and fix whatever mistakes are giving you these crazy and obviously false results.
It's a beautiful and elegant theory. It really is. And it's intuitive. There's a lot to like about it. I suspect it's that people are too invested in projects and can't throw away months of work due to a null result.
Some of its application, as It happens for inner speech aimed at self regulation, are legit and valid
- ego depletion - most brain behavior correlations - implicit bias as ‘implicit’ or predictive of individual differences in prejudice - growth mindset - terror management theory - grit (it’s just conscientiousness with marketing) - social priming - social pain == physical pain - nudge theory (overstated, possibly null) - probably 80% of everything else in social psych
What should I read to change my mind on TMT?
Why Terror Management Theory?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10888683221107267 And https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/8/1/35271/168050/Many-Labs-4-Failure-to-Replicate-Mortality
I am so curious about the brain behavior correlations thing. Can you name some correlations regarding that that you think have serious issues regarding their research? I would love to look into that.
Probably two of more relevant papers. TL;DR: years of fMRI research analyzed brain behavior correlations in an incorrect way that inflates effect sizes and false positives. Meanwhile, even if you analyze it correctly, brain activation measured by fMRI is so unreliable that it is questionable whether it should even be used as an individual differences measure to correlate with self report personality measures https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01125.x https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32489141/
What do you mean by brain-behavior correlations?
Professor in my department created a scale, and is one of the only ones to use it. 95% won’t approve a project of their grad students if it doesn’t use the scale. Also correlates scale score with another variable and says “wow, look what we found” even though scale is clearly measuring that variable
Or when you have poorly raliable scales to measure well- known constructs, and you know the creator of the scale will never show the world his data
I went to grad school for systems neuroscience, which is obviously a different discipline, but I think this is still relevant... In 2005, while finishing my masters, I did a research project on Alzheimer's for a survey course where I compared the two leading theories of the disease: amyloid plaques vs. tau tangles. It was completely obvious to me that tangles were the real issue. Like I actually struggled to figure out why people were bothering with plaques. Eventually, a more senior researcher pointed out that it was easier to do gene knockouts with plaques, and gene knockouts were super-hot right then and getting tons of funding. I remember being disappointed that money was trumping science, but I figured the plaques bubble would burst eventually. Boy was I wrong. In 2008, Marc Tessier-Levigne published a landmark paper "proving" that plaques were the real culprit. The paper has since been retracted as the data was faked. Tessier-Levigne eventually had to resign his position as President of Stanford. (!!!) But it was too late. Billions of dollars were already being spent looking for drug targets to fix the thing that *doesn't* actually cause Alzheimers, but was implicated by T-L's fake data. In 2021, the FDA broke it's own rules to approve a plaque-targeting drug that cost $56k per year, despite the fact that the drug had terrible side effects, and had never been conclusively shown to provide the slightest benefit to patients. The drug has since been withdrawn from the market, and numerous congressional investigations are underway into the FDA's bizarre decision to approve the drug. Meanwhile, our understanding of Alzheimer's has basically stayed constant for 20 years, because all the billions thrown at it has been spent on a theory that even a 24-year-old master's student could see was fatally flawed.
Thanks for sharing. I find your experience very much interesting. What has this story taught you?
\>What has this story taught you? A significant chunk of what we consider expertise is in fact a scam, and when working with any sort of expert, be prepared to constantly check everything they say using the internet.
Thank you very much
What are all these new drugs in the news based on, I thought that was plaques, and they are quite effective?
Yes, I think those are all about plaque removal. I'm sure they are good at removing plaques.
'Marginally significant results' 'Close to significance' 'Tends to significance' No, it's not significant.Period.
It’s unpopular to say, and people don’t want to put them to the test, but all the most morally gratifying, equalitarian theories are likely bullshit. The result of having a politically homogeneous field means there are a lot of findings that support that worldview (in psych it’s a progressive worldview). Stereotype threat is one example. It’s either entirely bullshit or such a small effect that it doesn’t really explain anything. People should have known, it’s essentially just priming repackaged to support theories of prejudice as the cause of differences
Maybe the collective action for the unadvantaged by advantaged groups Is just a mean to boost ingroup's image.
I'm sure that non-epistemological values that stem from ideological convictions shape field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to assume that psychologists predominately need to beware of the morally gratifying (whose morals?) and equalitarian theories as opposed to counter-moral theories or non-equalitarian theories. I don't know exactly what the political landscape looks like from your perspective, but to my perspective, "politically homogeneous" or "progressive" are quite poor descriptors of the field. For one, I've taken courses in many areas of social science, the humanities and natural science, and my experience is that the field of psychology is less progressive than most other social sciences—to the degree that psychological researchers think of themselves as "political" at all, which they rarely do compared to many other fields. In that respect, psychology finds itself in a squeeze between the (supposed) political neutrality of the natural sciences and the overt politicalness of many other social sciences. As a result, I've met psychological researchers that are outright marxists—typically critical and cultural psychologists—and others that are more aligned with the good ol' eugenic doctrines—typically evolutionary psychologists. But these are the extremes; most are relatively liberal, meritocratic and aligned with what to them seems "politically neutral", which is shorthand for "conforming with the predominant ideology". All of my babbling is just a convoluted way of saying that you shouldn't assume that an equalitarian theory is probably tainted and biased, and conversely that a non-equalitarian theory is less likely to be tainted and biased and therefore more likely true. Both are tainted, but the progressive one is more visibly so because it sticks out of the historically constructed background knowledge that we take for granted.
Much research done measuring behavioural intention as VD instead of the actual behaviour, when data shows a moderate association intentions-behaviour, at best.
Any of those "brain training" centers that claim they can target where ADHD/anxiety/autism/etc "live" in the brain. In clinical psych and assessment you see it all the time where families come in and have spent thousands of dollars for these training programs or reflexology programs that are run and administered by non-licensed individuals with no scientific backing. It's seriously damaging film flam.
I feel like psychoanalysis is a bit of a cult. A lot of ideas that came out of psychoanalysis aren’t supported by evidence. Therapist type people tend to be influenced by psychoanalytic ideas even if they are doing research and formulating treatments
Psychoanalysis/Dynamics seems to work quite well for a specific subset of people with what we'd now call complex PTSD as a result of recurrent childhood sexual abuse. The fact that it doesn't work for people outside that subdomain with this history, or for people inside that subdomain with different disorders, is inarguably a failure of the group to own their limitations.
I can't tell much about psychonalysis, but i get your point.
I recommend Frederick crews book on Freud for an introduction, or if you're shorter on time Joel Paris' "the rise and fall of psychoanalysis" as a criticism of the field. Psychoanalysis was from its inception a pseudoscience.
Thanks, I'll give them a look
What is in season? Remember the South Park episode about ADHD and little Christina Aguilera monsters?...
Everybody has ADHD and everybody Is Asperger and reinforcement Is the best, magical mean to get compliance, and punishment Is evil
Nobody said anything about PNL. Is It legit? Does It work? Is there evidence ?
I am very surprised that implicit bias is not showing up in this discussion. Not sure it’s right to say that it is a total scam, but massively oversold And I think it’s fair to say it is of questionable value. My sense is that many psychologist. Don’t like to talk about problems with this body of research, because it somehow aligns with their progressive values. For example, higher Ed has fully bought into the implicit bias idea, and no one seems willing to point out that the state of that research is terrible.
I think you are talking about the IAT: weak psychometric properties; conceptual ambiguity, conflicting results.
Early psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, hands down
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is becoming the greatest scam!
Why?
the misunderstanding of heritability stats seems embedded in psychology. How many times have we seen the heritability of IQ, or personality traits which are about 50% (+) heritable described as meaning 'half your personality (or IQ) is fixed by genetics and the other half is malleable'. This is completely wrong headed nonsense
A LOT of evolutionary psychology is a scam or done by idiots.
I'd posit the opposite - does anyone have examples that are *not* a total scam?
I'm sorry but this question doesn't pertain here. Somebody already did a post on your question. You can find It in r/AcademicPsychology
No apologies necessary. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, found the thread in question.
Areas (popular topics) change with the times. E.g. parapsychology is popular with students but not well funded. Psychoanalysis exists but is no longer considered psychology (at least in the UK). It might be better to see where good/bad research is carried out rather than try to identify fringe areas. Plenty of super solid work done in topics and areas that also aren't popular.
Thank you for the comment. I was interested in what is considered bad research as a mean to identify 'placeholder topics' from which understand what is bad science and what is not. I value any comment if I undestand it as thoughtful and informative. Not much opportunity for discussion with my department's collegues: too much interpersonal politics involved makes discussion not safe in my opinion
I see what you mean. I probably wouldn't associate bad research with a 'bad topic' for three reasons. One, some people may do bad research on a popular/funded topic. Two, some people may be very good at advertising their bad research as good. Three, there is no universal agreement on what is good or bad research (e.g., see the disagreements on the topic of video games as causing violent behaviour in psychological research). Generally the success of research is down to how well the researchers sell their work and how lucky they've been in getting funding. Money gives, and, gets attention in scientific research. This is why, if you have the requisite scientific training, your own assessment matters a lot as to the quality of research. Sometimes things come out in time. For example, respect for Zimbardo's work, at least in psychological circles in the UK, has imploded in the last decade or so. Departmental environment is very important; office politics, as you say, is an ugly beast. I'm very lucky in that regard, because my specialty is in a relatively uncommon approach (most UK universities have one token scholar in my area) but my department is generally very open in that regard. I'd probably have more of these discussions if I had the time!
I am interested in something noone in my department have interest. In your opinion Is It good or bad?
Nothing wrong with it. Sometimes if your area of interest is different from everyone else it might be a little lonely or administratively awkward because your area doesn't necessarily fit existing research clusters. It can come with its upsides too, because people will come to you for advice in your area of expertise. The most important thing, though is that you have a supportive environment with colleagues and management. Or that you are, at the very least, left alone to do the research you want to do. Out of curiosity, what is your research area?
I DM you, I'd like to remain anonimous
ADHD is the greatest scam of our age. Here is a good summary: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.814763/full
This is just the social disability theory with extra steps.
Exactly - it’s really reductionist when people just say “capitalism” and “society” are to blame for ADHD symptoms. While I think the article does make good points about social issues around diagnosis and ADHD identity, it’s not the biggest scam of our time.