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by torginus
1834 days ago
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What I don't understand is psychology research (at least in academia) does not seem to have moved behind the "we locked three dozen college kids in a classroom and had them perform some bizarre acts, through which we hope to pierce the veil of human nature" - style research. I feel like if something good could have come out of the social media age - is that we have documented the natural behaviour of a vast number of people over long stretches of time. I think this is the sort of invaluable data, that has the potential to advance the quantitative understanding of human nature. |
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Aren't the two most important aspects of the research the data set and the study methodology? Why on earth would you skimp so heavily one of them?
I don't work in the sciences, but this kind of nonsense doesn't exist in the "actual" sciences. Physicists spend loads of money producing just the right experiment conditions and documenting the manner the experiment was created in. The dataset is incredibly important and very rigorously examined.
But in psych, the dataset is basically an after thought. "Oh by the way, we chose a small handful of kids who happened to be free at that time, with no reason to believe there's any geo, social, educational, political, or ethnic background diversity, it probably cost us like $200 plus some pizza. Now let's print the results in $5 million worth of textbooks for a few decades!"
I don't buy the funding argument. A professor probably costs the university 100-150k/yr and will be working on a small handful (2-6, ish?) of projects. Buying an hour of a subject's time for a study must cost, what, $30/hr? Shouldn't they be allocating a minimum of $50k in funding for the actual research, and dropping at least $10k for a good dataset?
I don't buy the argument that most experiments don't yield good results so the university is wary of funding them. At a minimum they should follow up a cheap test with promising results with a real experiment that has actual funding before everyone gets all excited about it.