| The reproducibility problems of psychology general - of which this is only a small fragment - is showing a few things: 1) Psychology is harder than almost anyone thought. 2) We are only now starting to have enough data to know just how hard psychology really is. 3) There is too much of an onus to publish, "Publish or perish" in science in general. 4) Negative results are very valuable for the public and all other researchers, but generally negative for the researchers career. Even scientists need food. 5) People will use whatever that can pass for facts to further their own agenda, whatever that may be. Left, right, and center. Incidentally, psychology as a science has now taught us that both through its successes in that area, and through how people outside of psychology believed the authorities of psychology to be implicitly right whenever it fit their point of view. Psychology is a science, no need for the quotes, it's just happens to be incredibly hard to turn the experimental results into reliable facts in that particular field, so shortcomings of both people and systems become magnified. The high difficulty is probably also why some authorities might have gotten an unusually large role in the social networks underlying any area of research, and the public eye. People want answers, even if there isn't really enough data, and even when researchers says: We really don't know. Science is always only our best guess, in some areas it pretty darn good, but in others not so much, yet. |