The k2p blog

Psychology is an academic discipline but it is not (yet) a science.

The Hausergate affaire followed by the Diedrik Stapel affaire only confirmed my view that psychology as an academic discipline is permeated by confirmation bias (and sometimes just plain fraud). Now the Marc Hauser affaire reaches some kind of a conclusion (at least until he has served his “sentence” and is then “rehabilitated”) with the Office of Research Integrity’s report.

Retraction Watch comments on the ORI report:

Two years after questions surfaced about work by former Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser, an official government report is finally out.

It’s not pretty.

The findings by the Office of Research Integrity were first reported by the Boston Globe, which was also first to report the issues in Hauser’s work. They’re extensive, covering misconduct in four different NIH grants ……..

As I had posted at the end of last year, psychology as an academic discipline needs to start introducing some intellectual rigour:

That psychology is a discipline and a field of study is indisputable. That the study of human (or animal) behaviour is a worthy field and that experimentation and research are well worth pursuing is also obvious. But I am of the view that it is far from being a science.  Psychology can be considered to be a pre-science similar to alchemy. And the practitioners of psychology are similar to priests and shamans and witch-doctors and other practitioners of magic. Inevitably the field contains many charlatans.  …… In the various fields of psychology, the null hypothesis is rarely if ever brought into play. …..

…. As Paul Lutus so well puts it

…. psychology can make virtually any claim and offer any kind of therapy, because there is no practical likelihood of refutation – no clear criteria to invalidate a claim. This, in turn, is because human psychology is not a science, it is very largely a belief system similar to religion.

Tags: Confirmation bias, Diedrik Stapel, Harvard University, hausergate, marc hauser, Office of Research Integrity

This entry was posted on September 6, 2012 at 9:35 am and is filed under Academic misconduct, psychology, Science, scientific misconduct. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.