[palata]

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results".

Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?

[embedding-shape]

> Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?

In order for someone to answer this, I think you need to come up with some sort of definition what "actual", "useful" and "valid" actually means here in this context.

Lots of stuff from psychology been successfully applied to treat people in therapy with various issues, but is that "valid" enough for you? Something tells me you already know some people are being helped in therapy one way or another, yet it seems to me those might not be "useful" enough, since I don't clearly understand what would be "useful" to you if not those examples.

[bluGill]

Psychology "knows" that people don't enter treatment until things are really bad, and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided. Finding treatment that is better than others is the important part and they also know they are not very good at that.

[embedding-shape]

> and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided

I don't know what experience of therapy you've had in the past, but this is typically not how it works. People get better when a treatment is applied that is suitable to them as a person and the context, not sure where you'd get the whole "people get better no matter what treatment is applied", haven't been true in my experience.

[fgd135]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

[bluGill]

I'm only reporting what I heard in my intro to psychology class years ago... Still, this is more revision to a mean applying. There are for sure treatments that are better than doing nothing, there are also treatments worse than doing nothing. But in general people tend to get better after a time. (they often get worse again in a few months, but this was not covered in class).

[palata]

That's an interesting point, and I think I can explain a bit more how I see it:

I am not entirely convinced that one needs to study psychology at university in order to be a therapist. Actually what I seem to see around me is that different people need different kinds of therapies. Maybe some need to talk to someone with a university degree in "psychology", others just need to talk to someone with empathy. Or someone neutral. Or they need faith. Or sport. Even homeopathy, if it helps (and knowing that the whole concept is bullshit). Whatever helps, helps.

Still anecdotal, but the people I know who studied psychology were not great at "maths". Like it's not the first choice of people who are good with science. And again in my experience, those people have a tendency to not be extremely good at understanding whether or not they can conclude anything from their numbers. Added to the fact that it's very far from "hard science", it doesn't inspire confidence in whatever is claimed to be "scientifically proven".

Then there are the psychologists who make you pass tests for some jobs. I have had that a few times in different circumstances, and it always baffled me how after asking me a few "weird" questions they would feel entitled to tell me "who I am", as if they knew better than I did. Again not inspiring confidence.

So I always had a tendency to say "I think when it's trying to say something about an individual, it's probably bullshit. But if you can make statistics on a group of people, I guess there you can learn things". And then you see that even those famous experiments that were supposed to be exactly like that were bullshit.

[Sharlin]

I'd think the conclusion you should draw is not that "even the famous experiments were not valid, so nothing in psychology is" but rather "the validity of an experiment does not correlate with how famous it is".

[d-us-vb]

A direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence.

See also the replication crisis.

[watwut]

Famous experiments are not chosen by academia. They are chosen by non academics. What you usually find is academics being much more reserved and more critical of these then journalists, bloggers or random commenters on HN.

[r-w]

I don't know about "much more reserved"... Citation needed. In the absence of evidence otherwise I assume academics are just people.

[watwut]

Yes they are just people - people who are much close to the topic then random commenters on HN.

Frankly, you made up accusation of academics from nothing and without bothering to check what they generally say. You just made it up

[Dylan16807]

What accusation did r-w make...?

[wredcoll]

I don't think academia runs fox news and cnn but I'll withhold judgement

[r-w]

s/voice/authority/

[palata]

I guess my point is that I don't need to think for long before I find an example justifying why physics is a serious field.

What would be the equivalent of Newton's laws in psychology? Does such a thing exist? Or does the whole field just prove how complicated human beings are by being incapable of proving anything else (which in itself would be an interesting result, don't get me wrong)?

[Sharlin]

Physics is an exact, quantitative, natural science. Psychology is neither exact, quantitative (usually), nor a natural science. They are not comparable. But like many other fields of study that are not hard sciences, psychology can still be useful and valuable. (Note the "can". Given the replication crisis, how much of psychology actually is I cannot say.)

[palata]

Sure, I agree with that.

But do we have an example of something that is provably valuable? I am genuinely interested: after reading this article, I realised that there is nothing I can attribute to psychology off the top of my head.

I mean, Milgram used to be one, but well...

[IanCal]

The results absolutely are interesting - in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested.

> While every obedient participant reliably pressed the shock lever, they regularly neglected or ruined the other steps required to justify the shock.

Procedural violations here include things like asking the question while the person in the other room was still screaming.

[palata]

> in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested.

In a situation where they know that they are in a controlled lab experiment.

[eadler]

You may enjoy https://forrt.org/ and in particular https://forrt.org/replication-hub/

[jagged-chisel]

The Hawthorne effect is real. And I don’t think we will ever get a 100% solid grip on what’s happening in others’ minds. Well, until we can actually read, understand, and interpret brain activity at the cellular level.

[whynotmaybe]

In Dan Ariely's book, "predictably irrational", there's a chapter about how everyone cheats a little.

And based on everyone I've met, and on Dan Ariely's own actions (1), I've concluded this one is true.

We all cheat a little from time to time.

Ex : for me, driving a few km/h above the speed limit is "cheating a little"

1 : https://www.businessinsider.com/dan-ariely-duke-fraud-invest...

[caseyohara]

The ironic part is the recent fabrication controversy with Ariely. He’s recently had to retract fraudulent papers (one of them, most ironically, on the topic of honesty) because of falsified data. It makes one question the validity of all of his work.

His relationship with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t a good look either.

[whynotmaybe]

"Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge."

Mason Cooley

[tokai]

Those two experiments are over 50 years old. Its a bit like dismissing physics because Hubble got his constant wrong. Psychology has a lot of issues, but its also an enormous field. If your frame of reference is half a century out of date you should probably start with some encyclopedia articles.

[palata]

Well I don't need to start with encyclopedia articles to convince myself that physics is a serious field, do I? Or maths, or chemistry.