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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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Soft sciences in general need to be covered more in the fields OP mentioned! Psych and philosophy should be taught in high school, too. The amount of arrogant asshole STEM majors I've met that think experts in sociology and psychology are just making shit up is too damn high. Ironically I did a deep dive on delusions recently and it's wild realizing that's what some of these folks are suffering from.
To be clear - delusions are not a character flaw. We all probably have had a few in our lifetime. The fucks I'm thinking of just push their delusions onto others and become emotionally abusive by weaponizing the term against people for shit like preferring neutral pronouns. They don't bother to ask why someone (like me) might have the preference.
/tangent
To be fair to the soc/psych skeptics, there has been quite a number of scandals where famous TED talk researchers had their big theories discredited due to failure to replicate. “Power posing” was the big meme one but there are many others including ego depletion, social priming, and the facial feedback hypothesis.
The replication crisis is extremely embarrassing for the field.
The replication is actually evidence to me of moral reasoning. There are limits to the types of experiments we can or should be willing to perform. Power posing was never considered an entire scientific model like the sex/gender distinction.
You mean the lack of replication? Yes, it’s evidence that humans are sophisticated reasoners and that simplistic “life hacks” like smiling at yourself in a mirror are not effective. But then these are among the most widely known “findings” of psychology, so the field’s reputation suffers.
Where are you getting the idea that's one of the most widely known findings? I'm genuinely asking, I hadn't heard about it in years.
These are all the findings that make the TED talk circuits.
And you use Ted talks to see what's most popular??
We’re talking about widely known psychology results. TED talks, articles in the New York Times, interviews on daytime TV. We’re not talking about whose textbook is most well known in psychology departments.
Ok. I guess you think I'm being an elitist, so I just asked an LLM "What are the most popular concepts in psychology understood by the overall population, and what metrics do you use to determine that?" Chopping down the responses, I got: Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, Personality Types (like Myers Briggs), Freud's Psychoanalysis, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Behaviorism, IQ and Intelligence Testing, Positive Reinforcement, Depression and Anxiety, and Mindfulness and Meditation.
That's based on search engines trends, social media mentions, media representation, surveys and polls, academic citations and book sales.
A few of those are outdated concepts, but it takes time for the general public to catch up. So, I'm not sure this supports how people in general might be skeptical of the field. It's healthy to have some skepticism, but I was referring to people that will take one example and act like it discredits the whole field. That is some poor critical thinking that I doubt many actually believe. The same people I've argued with on sex/gender will also gladly talk about the benefits of some of the stuff the LLM brought up, too. There's just a lot of societal indoctrination and sexist reasoning to try to discredit that specific theory.
Sorry I'm going a bit into AuDHD mode here. I like talking about this stuff but if it's too much I'll stop
Even some of the stuff you mentioned, such as MBTI (personality “types”), Freud’s theories, Maslow’s hierarchy, and behaviourism are discredited. My point about the TED talk pop psych stuff being discredited though was not to say the general public has rejected these theories. They haven’t. It’s that science has moved on but the public lags behind.
Notice that I never said (throughout this discussion) that the general public is skeptical of psychology. The general public tends to lack the tools of critical thinking needed for healthy skepticism in general (not just in regards to psychology). Saying something is discredited is only saying that science has moved on, not the general public (which even continues to believe in silly things like astrology that have been discredited for centuries).
However, that is not to say the public is totally clueless. While they lack proper critical thinking skills, they do have the ability to become aware of when scientists’ reputations are damaged. This is a far more diffuse effect because the public isn’t generally aware of the differences between individual scientists and their debates within a field. And that’s where the really big problem exists:
An individual scientist can become popular communicating their theory to the public. But when their theory is later discredited the reputational damage can affect the field or even all of science as a whole. Over time this can lead to popular anti-intellectualism, such as we see with climate change denial.