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Ten Psychology Findings That Have Been Difficult to Replicate.

barbc56

Senior Member
Messages
3,657
An informative and quite entertaining article. The one about the picture on the wall is downright creepy.
Given the public fascination with psychology, and the powerful influence of certain results, it is arguably in the public interest to summarise in one place a collection of some of the most famous findings that have proven tricky to repeat. This is not a list of disproven or dodgy results. It’s a snapshot of the difficult, messy process of behavioral science
My bold.
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/09/1...indings-that-its-been-difficult-to-replicate/
 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901

is psychology really in crisis?? I crossed paths w someone I knew in college who's now a therapist and seemed pretty nuts herself! It made me question the field, but I don't know much about it and have had positive therapy experiences myself..
 
Messages
3,263
Only ten ?
These ten have been submitted to the most systematic replication efforts - multiple labs, lots of participants, careful control of methods used, etc.
is psychology really in crisis?? I crossed paths w someone I knew in college who's now a therapist and seemed pretty nuts herself! It made me question the field, but I don't know much about it and have had positive therapy experiences myself..
I do not think this stuff has filtered through much to the clinical profession of Psychology. But its big amongst Psychology researchers. All have heard of the "replication crisis". Young academics are increasingly expected to display an understanding of the issues in job interviews, etc.
 

Alvin2

The good news is patients don't die the bad news..
Messages
2,997
I think psychology can't see the forest for the trees. Those 10 studies, some make no sense, some are a dog chasing its own tail.
That said they went from freud's ridiculous ramblings to a mechanistic view of emotions. They have not graduated to a realistic understanding of human emotional bonds and emotional development.
 

JaimeS

Senior Member
Messages
3,408
Location
Silicon Valley, CA
is psychology really in crisis??

Not psychologists, but psychological findings are having a "replication crisis". Research Group A publishes on Finding X. (They were coincidentally already treating patients under the assumption X was true.) Group B tries to find the same thing and fails. (Coincidentally, Group B did not have this pre-existing bias.)

Trials like PACE make the whole business very public.
 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901
I do not think this stuff has filtered through much to the clinical profession of Psychology. But its big amongst Psychology researchers. All have heard of the "replication crisis". Young academics are increasingly expected to display an understanding of the issues in job interviews, etc.

I thought this letter by Dr Thomas Insel (former director of NIMH) to the APA was genius... He wrote it after the APA delivered the updated DSM (diagnostic manual for clinicians..) extremely late..

Speaking of research, the DSM is founded on research and exists in part for insurance companies to decide to pay or how much to pay... If the validity of research is being questioned, then the insurance cos. will no doubt jump at the chance to pay less..
"While many of these changes have been contentious, the final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition, based on new insights emerging from research since 1990 when DSM-IV was published. Sometimes this research recommended new categories (e.g., mood dysregulation disorder) or that previous categories could be dropped (e.g., Asperger’s syndrome)."

...and I love me some shady Insel!
the bold style is mine, to mark my fave shade (eg putting "reliability" in quotes... as if they're delivering it a wink and saying, "you know, more or less"), and the parentheses/italics are what I imagine is his internal monologue to be..lol:

"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, (you could have just delivered it in post-its for all the effort you put into it) creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” (you know DSM is the foundation for insurance claims and referrals?!? this chaos is going to be the death of me... )– each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. (ditto last comment except more exasperated this time) Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, (we're a laughing stock in the medical community) not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.(my med school roommate is a neurosurgeon now... how did I get mixed up with the wrong crowd?)"​



 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901
Not psychologists, but psychological findings are having a "replication crisis". Research Group A publishes on Finding X. (They were coincidentally already treating patients under the assumption X was true.) Group B tries to find the same thing and fails. (Coincidentally, Group B did not have this pre-existing bias.)

Trials like PACE make the whole business very public.

but research is the basis for the DSM, which is the basis for insurance evaluation/payment and referrals... it's the framework of the whole scaffold.. see the my other post...

interesting topic..
 

sarah darwins

Senior Member
Messages
2,508
Location
Cornwall, UK
It's been said often before within these pages — not least by me — but the more I see of psychology the more it reminds me of the Cultural Studies minor I took at college: a field where any conclusion is precisely as valid as its antithesis, where any point of view is 'legitimate'.

All of which is fine for an academic discipline, and the process may here and there generate some light along with the comforting heat. But I wouldn't let a cultural theorist loose on a sick person. I'm not sure why psychologists get a pass (and a pay check).
 
Messages
1,478
I think behavioural science in itself is not bad. There is much to be learned from the study of primates to understand human evolution and brain development etc. ( as one example). Psychology however seems to be prone to suffering from philosophical arguments creeping in. Once this happens, you might as well label it subjective opinion or a religion rather than science.
 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901
@ebethc, DSM is Psychiatry, the replication crisis is in Psychology, different kettle of fish entirely.

Psychiatry has its own problems, sure, but that's a different thread.

I must have misunderstood... I thought authors of DSM review research + use their own clinical experience to create the DSM
 
Messages
3,263
I must have misunderstood... I thought authors of DSM review research + use their own clinical experience to create the DSM
The DSM is such a huge subject, hard to know where to start! But its largely a consensus document written by committees of practising psychiatrists (many publish too), and its primary purpose is to improve diagnostic agreement amongst clinicians who diagnose psychiatric and related disorders.

Its kind of good to have a DSM. The criticisms are more around what diagnoses it includes and the criteria used for classifying a person with each disorder. One criticism is that many of the distinctions are artificial, and based more on historical tradition than on any real understanding of the aetiology (causes) of psychiatric disorders.

Another is that the DSM (we're currently on version 5, DSM-V) is based more on the beliefs and personal interests of the committee members rather than on a systematic review of current theory or research. So if some suggest we get rid of a diagnosis X, there is usually a huge lobby group of psychiatrists who specialise in X who don't want that to happen. So it stays in.

But I may be out of line there, they may do some research reviewing too.
 

ebethc

Senior Member
Messages
1,901
@Woolie

I like Insell's POV re adding more science... It's a shame how little is understood about so many illnesses.. Insell has an interesting Ted talk about schizophrenia, for example... I live in a city w a big homeless population, and I think they're primarily suffering from some severe mental illness (vs down on their luck and w help could be functional again..)