[chriswarbo]

> The big advantage of OO is that it acts as a distillation of how humans think.

Citation needed.

Browsing around Google Scholar for variations of "object oriented empirical comparison" shows a huge body of research comparing various OO approaches to each other, but very few comparing OO approaches to anything else. Those which I have been able to find compare OO to procedural code, and find either no significant difference in comprehension levels, or that procedural code is easier to understand (ie. closer to "how humans think") than OO:

An empirical study of novice program comprehension in the imperative and object-oriented styles

http://ftp.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall00/cps189s/readings/p124-...

Assessing the cognitive consequences of the object-oriented approach: A survey of empirical research on object-oriented design by individuals and teams

http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.HC/0611154

An exploratory study of program comprehension strategies of procedural and object-oriented programmers

http://www.ptidej.net/courses/inf6306/fall11/slides/11%20-%2...

I've only been able to find one source comparing OO with functional programming, which didn't measure comprehension. Instead, it compared code quality metrics between C++ and Standard ML. Most showed no significant difference, except for SML taking longer to run its tests (it also had more tests), having higher code and library re-use and having a larger number of errors per 1000 lines (although the same number of known errors overall):

Comparing programming paradigms: an evaluation of functional and object-oriented programs

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/250597/1/report3_Harrison_95.pdf

[chton]

The most commonly cited proponents of this viewpoint are Rosson and Alpert (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1455754, behind a paywall). The first study you linked refers to them and a few other explicitly, and uses their research as a basis. It's difficult to find much more than those, because this kind of 'programming philosophy' is rarely under this level of academic scrutiny.

Aside from official sources, it's a statement that I didn't think needed much citation. It's absolutely fair to criticize it, but it's a widely-held belief that seems to hold true (at least anecdotally)

[kazagistar]

The reason I was initially skeptical of these kinds of claims is because:

(1) Many of those people making it weren't too experienced in reasonable alternatives.

(2) Many developers I know (also anecdotally) spent years studying OOP to get to the point where they can use most of its higher level patterns effectively, and judge FP based off a single class or toy project built in a some lisp derivative, or what they heard from a friend.

(3) Those people making the opposite claim actually had fair bit of experience with both methodologies, since it is hard to avoid OOP.

In other words, it seems like the claim "OOP fits the brain better" is a prevailing meme, largely among those who have not tested the claim effectively, while "FP is pretty good and we need to lean on it more" is fairly popular with those who have actually tested the claim, instead of relying on hearsay.

Obviously, my personal experience shouldn't convince you that your statement is wrong. (I was a big fan of OOP who devoted quite a bit of time learning software engineering with both classes and prototypes before trying out FP and finding out just how much OOP was silly and could be replaced with simpler, more composable FP ideas). Nor do I think that all of the claims made by the FP people are right. But realize that your statement DOES require significant evidence to back its claims, and that resorting to populism gives it relatively little real support.