29 Comments

This essay could easily have been a lot more defensive, and I appreciate the nuanced approach of attempting to reckon with the actual situation, rather than presenting a fantastical vision of scientific research. Something that often frustrates me is when people think theories accurately describe reality just because they were uttered by a scientist and peer-reviewed. Psychology, like all fields of science, is an attempt to build useful models with which we can explain or predict certain events and situations. The models are meant to resemble and replicate reality as much as possible, but it is important, I think, to never confuse the model with reality itself!

Expand full comment
Sep 20, 2022·edited Sep 20, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

As a geographer, I can empathize with having my science dismissed. It's hard to explain how important the field of geography is to the uninitiated, because it basically treats all the other sciences like a goodie grab-bag and says "but let's analyze it spatially." Someone I know once asked me "Isn't geography just non-scientific geology?" It is most definitely not. Geography explains the interconnectedness between geology and meteorology and biology and ocean mechanics and crisis management and sociology and politics and yes, psychology. After all, the World Population Review (a bunch of geographers) ranks countries by happiness. And once we know where people are happier, then we can look into why people in different places might be happier, further enriching and informing psychology...

I love geography.

I understand saying we live in the Dark Ages (my dad had to have his jaw broken and re-set to help his TMJ, and a chiropractor once said that if I wanted to aggressively treat my mild scoliosis they could strap me to a table and slowly pull me in two different directions). But I think simultaneously we are also experiencing some enlightenment. Personal boundaries and bodily autonomy have really come into the popular conscious in a way that they weren't, even as recently as when I was a kid. And I think that advancement was built on some pretty big stones in the field of psychology. In other words, we don't know everything, but I think we've learned some pretty nice pieces. Some of these rocks are pretty solid and well-formed.

Expand full comment
author

I appreciate that description of geography; I had never heard it described that way.

I agree we've built some good, solid stones in psychology! Affective forecasting, the stereotype content model, the planning fallacy, etc. I just think people assume it's one paper = one stone when it's more like 100 or 1000 papers.

Expand full comment

Oh, for sure. I'm confident that every field has loads of stinkers of papers. The way that being tenured in a scientific field works basically guarantees that there will be a big slush pile o' nonsense around the gems.

Expand full comment
Sep 20, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

So, I agree that many findings are unimportant. That said, aren’t there major theories that have gotten a lot of traction but might be oversold? And that does matter, right? For instance, individuals and organizations have put lots of time and even money into learning/teaching about grit and mindfulness based on experiments by people like Mischel and Langer. To what degree have those studies held up? And if their haven’t, to what degree have they stopped showing up in self-help books and K-12 curricula and the like?

Expand full comment
author

I think this is part of why it's important to understand the state of psychology, because if you do, you won't launch a big intervention in your organization or your life based on a study you heard about. (Just like you shouldn't start eating lots of chocolate when you read an article about how mice live longer eating chocolate or something.) You'd also take more care to evaluate the effects that these changes have in your life.

I'm not up on the current state of the evidence on Mischel, but there's a whole post to be written about what the marshmallow study is really about. I had Langer in seminar in grad school and it's super interesting to hear speak, but I would not rely on any of the work replicating (also a long story).

Expand full comment
Sep 20, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

You should read The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal, he has a whole chapter about the overselling of grit. I think a lot of studies that travel to the pop psych/mainstream discourse are important, in that they tell good stories, but many of them fall apart under scrutiny.

Expand full comment

Thanks! I like him from what I know of him.

Expand full comment

Thank you! This newsletter is the one I clicked the fastest when it appears in my inbox. Your fantastic writing and thinking might have something to do with it!

Yup, you caught me, I DID think science was a castle. I also DID think that we weren’t in the Dark Ages, to some degree; I think we have political and economic forces to blame, in part, for that: that scientists are incentivized to make their work seem amazingly NOT Dark Agey in order to continue to get funding and pull those levers.

I will say something about the Prometheus myth of science rubs me the wrong way, and I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe the assumption that resistance always marks the struggle for useful knowledge? I don’t think the universe always resists you in the quest for knowledge, scientific or otherwise. I think some of that resistance is naturalized or normalized by the methods we have culturally decided produce legitimate knowledge. But I have a hunch that a wider, culturally inclusive approach may connect us with other forms of knowledge gathering and verification that don’t feel so… bad or evil. Just a hunch!

Ummm also I’m speaking as an ethnographer, and I fucking love my job, but also the world is full of scientists who dismiss the work I do as “folk psychology” ;) But do I feel like I’m stealing fire? Maybe when I find something thrilling. Not because I feel like the universe, or nature, or other people, are trying to kill me.

Ok see you in two weeks!

Expand full comment
author

I see your point! I wonder if it feels different in ethnography because you are, ideally, allied with the people you're studying to figure out something true about humans. (It is a fair critique of psychology that we are, if anything, trained to feel the opposite.) I'd still say that Nature still puts obstacles in the way of that work in the form of bias (stereotypes, confirmation bias, etc.), like you're trying to swim to the bottom of the lake to see what's down there but the buoyant force keeps pushing you back up. But those barriers between you and the truth, not between you and your participants. I may be stretching the metaphor!

For what it's worth, I think ethnography is cool, and I wish there wasn't such a firewall between psychologists and ethnographers.

Expand full comment

I love what you’re noting about being allied. I think that is right — and I hadn’t thought about the almost adversarial position you indicate in psychology: we are trying to “trick” the subject into revealing the strange ways their minds work, ways they would probably readily deny.

Yes there are certainly oppositional forces in ethnography as well, but one thing I love about my work is it often feels like we separate the allied phases from the oppositional phases, doing a full wide-eyed immersion on the side of the subject and only LATER, in a different room and with different colleagues, trying to deconstruct and decouple and make sense by being critical. At least that’s how I prefer to work.

Pleased to meet a psychologist who’s down to chat with ethnographers! 😝🤝🤝🤝

Expand full comment
Sep 22, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

Terrific discussion, but it also needs to be said: this is a f*cking masterpiece just from a pure writing perspective as well. 👏👏👏

Expand full comment

Psychology has no Archimedean point. The subject and object are one in the same. It is the only science where this is the case. Maybe if we reintroduced soul back into it we would fare better, I don't know.

Expand full comment

Love it Adam (and Kyle)

Expand full comment

I should have specified that it is depth psychology that I am referring to. I remember reading a book titled "We've Had a 100 Years of Psychotherapy---and the World's Getting Worse." It's a conversion between James Hillman and Michael Ventura. Good read.

Expand full comment

I (a psychologist) was once married to a physicist. When he would mock the scientific credibility of psych, I would remind him that we are studying things that are FAR more complex than physics has managed so far.

I think we're just past the 'alchemy' phase, in psych. Still lots of garbage out there, but some important and useful info.

BTW, some of the useless/unimportant studies actually are useful in a different way; I truly don't care whether holding a pen in your teeth or your lips makes you find a joke funnier/less funny. But I do care about whether our physical expression of emotion can in turn influence the emotion we feel, in a bit of a feedback loop. And I would like to disprove the theory that emotion is just our body's reaction to thoughts.

Expand full comment

>When he would mock the scientific credibility of psych, I would remind him that we are studying things that are FAR more complex than physics has managed so far.

Do we, though? And are we doing it successfully? As a psychologist myself, I disagree with both claims.

I disagree that we study more complex things than physics. If the human brain is part of the physical universe and human behavior and experience is a product of the brain, I don't see how behavior and experience can be more complex than the physical universe. If human behavior and experience are not the product of the brain, I don't see how they can be studied empirically.

Are we studying human behavior and experience more successfully than physics studies the natural world? I believe the job of any empirical science is to establish robust rules and facts about the world. Physics has done that. Using physics knowledge, you can predict insanely complicated and complex things from just a few assumptions and will be correct.

However, that is not the case in psychology. Even high-level theories like "working memory" and "dissonance theory" have not been specified enough to make accurate predictions. Other theories work fairly well in the laboratory under varied conditions but often fail in reality because it's unclear how to establish crucial parameter, such as prospect theory ("What do people experience as a loss in real life?").

Karl Popper wrote his PhD in psychological methods. His yardstick for true knowledge about the world is simple. Human knowledge is always fallible but if you are repeatedly making correct predictions regarding relevant problems, you are probably on the right track. In physics, calculating precise predictions is the norm and a foundational part of the curriculum. In psychology, calculating precise predictions rarely occurs and, from many, many talks I've had about this, is rarely a part of the curriculum.

Expand full comment

You’re assuming that I’ve said that psychology studies its topic as well as physics does, when that wasn’t my point at all, if you’ll check my comment. Actually I would usually then follow up by saying that right now psychology is at or perhaps barely beyond the level of alchemy in the physical sciences. We have a very long way to go!

You’re also limiting psychology to the study the brain and its functioning. The domain of psychology is much wider, more complex and integrated than that, as I’m sure you’re aware.

Psychology often has pretensions far beyond its current capacities. But I don’t think it’s because we’re doing it all wrong and there’s an obvious and clear way to do it better. Perhaps best simply to reduce the expectations, including being more transparent with those who study psych, about what we have accomplished and can accomplish at this point.

Expand full comment

I guess we were both talking a bit past each other. We definitely agree about some things (giving up pretensions, psychology addresses a more abstract level than the brain) and disagree about others. I'll just say this: I believe there are obvious and clear ways how to do things better, very smart people have written lots about it, but too few are listening.

Expand full comment

>Psychology has an additional problem: it’s a young science

No, not at all. Claiming this falsehood needs to stop. A rough timeline why this is false.

Psychology's origins are mostly in Philosophy (William James, Ebbinghaus) and Medicine (Freud, Fechner, Wundt). This all took place in the late 1800's, max early 1900's. In the 1920's, industrial/organisational psychology was added because of efforts to make work more efficient and safer (the Gilbreths, Münsterberg).

Psychology was an established thing by the 1910's. If it had not been an established thing, John B. Watson could not have written a Behaviorism manifesto in 1913, addressing Psychology as a collective field. You know which fields are equally "young"? Almost all of them. Most disciplines were formed or professionalized during the second half of the 1800's. My country's first true engineering university was established in 1878.

Not to speak of Computer Science (foundations in the late 1930's, took off in the 1950's). Do they whine about being too young?

Psychology does not need puppy protection. It must recon with an ugly truth: The field sucks at creating deep, formalized theories. Psychology is ok-good at two things: testing rules ("Does media consumption influence political views?") and establishing facts ("Media consumption does influence political views, but only for people with attribute X."). However, Psychology utterly sucks at creating robust rules outside of known situations because it has never cared about formalization: translating empirical results to logical sentences.

Psychology seems young because you can't pick up a theory book about it. Introductory books show a collection of classical experiments and some narrative about how cognition might work. A group of people making predictions based on these narratives will greatly vary in their predictions because theories are woefully underspecified.

Psychology can provide a firm methodological framework for evaluating hypotheses about human behavior, but it fails at integrating empirical results into an "if-then" knowledge base. That, however, is the hallmark of a true empirical science.

Expand full comment

> That means trying to replicate psychology studies is a bit like kicking one of those stones, watching it shatter into a million pieces, and going, “Aha! Nothing can be built on this!” But there wasn’t anything built on it.

Oh, but there was. Clinical psychology - people with no medical training practising medicine - has replaced psychiatry all over the developed world.

> Psychology has an additional problem: it’s a young science, and we don’t have a strong sense of what’s important and what’s not.

You also don't have the stigma of only working with crazy people, which is how we, in Italy, ended up with a "psychologist bonus" - free money from the state for those who want to pay a psychologist to listen to their problems.

Expand full comment

Great writing! The best generic idea I have about psychology is that every human being always makes the best available decision at all situations; the difference between human beings is just ability to understands the available facts and ability to keep enough data in working memory; the less facts you can handle, the worse decisions you make.

Expand full comment

I have crazy mood swings (undiagnosed bipolar perhaps -- my brother is clinically diagnosed and I am quite similar symptomatically), and it always strikes me how differently I react to the same piece of writing under different moods. This piece resonated a lot with me when I was feeling black; rereading it right now when I'm a lot more positive it feels -- off, like I'm seeing the black version of myself from the outside (albeit a lot more articulate and knowledgeable). Made me a bit sad. Current me loves Our World in Data and can't get enough of their main theme; black me would've pushed it away in disgust for their cloying positivity and preferred pieces like this instead.

Expand full comment
Mar 20, 2023·edited Mar 20, 2023

Our world is situational psychology, like the Stanford experiment. Subjects are either cases or psychologists, one serving as inmate, the other, corrections officer. Psychology has caused the mental healthcare crisis of our day, algorithmically, in tandem with big tech, social media, private industry and world governments. We will not have enough critical minerals left soon to produce meds. What will you do then? When the crazies figured out what I already have? Gaslight us more?

Good luck....

Expand full comment

Good article. But it would be stronger if it didn’t accept the biased, scientistic prejudice that ESP is so absurd an idea that a study providing evidence that it exists is proof of something going wrong. There’s a lot of strong evidence supporting the existence of ESP, and as you yourself admit, we are still living in the dark ages of science. Don’t be so certain our current materialistic science has absolutely delineated the borders of what is thinkable and what is absurd.

Expand full comment

Hi. Very interesting discussion. Do you know this quotation?

"Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks: but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house” (Henri Poincaré)

I don’t have a sub stack of my own ;-) but I dusted off an old blog post you might be interested in.

https://the-wagging-dog.blogspot.com/p/crisis-what-crisis.html

Expand full comment