The Helpful Crisis in Psychology

From The New Yorker, excerpts from an outstanding article by by Gary Marcus: According to the headlines, social psychology has had a terrible year—and, at any rate, a bad week. The New York Times Magazine devoted nearly seven thousand words to Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who committed fraud in at least fifty-four scientific papers, while Nature just published a report about another controversy, questioning whether some well-known “social-priming” results from the social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis are replicable. Dijksterhuis famously found that thinking about a professor before taking an exam improves your performance, while thinking about a soccer ruffian makes you do worse. Although nobody doubts that Dijksterhuis ran the experiment that he says he did, it may be that his finding is either weak, or simply wrong—perhaps the peril of a field that relies too heavily on the notion that if something is statistically likely, it can be counted on. Things aren’t quite as bad as they seem, though. Although Nature’s report was headlined “Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology,” it scarcely noted that there have been some replications of experiments modelled on Dijksterhuis’s phenomenon. His finding could still out turn to be right, if weaker than first thought. More broadly, social priming is just one thread in the very rich fabric of social psychology. The field will survive, even if social priming turns out to have been overrated or an unf...
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Classic Experiments Social Psychology Source Type: blogs