Oct 10, 2023 05:19 PM
https://sciencenorway.no/psychology-soci...ch/2257776
EXCERPTS: In 2022, psychology professor Gerald Haeffel made an urgent call to his colleagues worldwide: "Research psychologists need to get tired of winning every time!"
One new survey that Haeffel refers to showed that 96 percent of psychological studies concluded that the hypothesis was correct.
That’s not good.
When scientists are almost always right, it is not a sign that they are geniuses but rather a disturbing hint that something is wrong with the studies.
The survey Haeffel referred to is by no means the first sign of problems in psychological research.
Several researchers had begun to question the quality of many investigations in the early 2010s. And in 2015, a firebrand of a study was published in the scientific journal Science.
Researcher Brian Nosek and a large group of colleagues had set up a huge test. They selected 100 random psychology studies that had recently been published in three prestigious scientific journals. Then the researchers simply ran the studies again to see if they would achieve the same results. They didn't.
Replication crisis Ninety-seven percent of the original studies confirmed the researchers' hypotheses. When exactly the same studies were conducted again, only 37 percent of them supported the hypothesis.
And even in these studies, the results were often far weaker than in the original studies.
Several major psychological truths were called into question in the wake of this and other investigations. A significant percentage of what I learned as an undergraduate in psychology in 2001 has since been shown not to hold water.
The problems in the field are often referred to as a replication crisis. The problems within social psychology, which tries to explain how humans affect each other mentally, have been pointed to in particular. But other areas, such as clinical psychology, also appear to be affected.
The well-known statistician and science critic John Ioannidis wrote in 2022 that most of the documentation we have on psychotherapy is highly distorted.
[...] Joar Øveraas Halvorsen is a specialist in clinical psychology and an associate professor at NTNU. He also believes that many of the studies in psychology are of poor quality. This in turn leads to a lot of the knowledge in the field being less reliable.
“We can say very few things with any great degree of certainty in my field. A significant proportion of what I learned as an undergraduate in psychology in 2001 has since been shown not to hold water,” he says.
[...] Jan Ivar Røssberg is professor of psychiatry at the University of Oslo and a senior physician in psychiatry at Oslo University Hospital. He has conducted many psychotherapy studies and is well acquainted with the research in the field.
He also confirms the research problems. “You have to look far and wide for studies where the researcher’s own beliefs don’t win out. I only know of one study where the researcher's own method ended up as the least effective one,” says Røssberg... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: In 2022, psychology professor Gerald Haeffel made an urgent call to his colleagues worldwide: "Research psychologists need to get tired of winning every time!"
One new survey that Haeffel refers to showed that 96 percent of psychological studies concluded that the hypothesis was correct.
That’s not good.
When scientists are almost always right, it is not a sign that they are geniuses but rather a disturbing hint that something is wrong with the studies.
The survey Haeffel referred to is by no means the first sign of problems in psychological research.
Several researchers had begun to question the quality of many investigations in the early 2010s. And in 2015, a firebrand of a study was published in the scientific journal Science.
Researcher Brian Nosek and a large group of colleagues had set up a huge test. They selected 100 random psychology studies that had recently been published in three prestigious scientific journals. Then the researchers simply ran the studies again to see if they would achieve the same results. They didn't.
Replication crisis Ninety-seven percent of the original studies confirmed the researchers' hypotheses. When exactly the same studies were conducted again, only 37 percent of them supported the hypothesis.
And even in these studies, the results were often far weaker than in the original studies.
Several major psychological truths were called into question in the wake of this and other investigations. A significant percentage of what I learned as an undergraduate in psychology in 2001 has since been shown not to hold water.
The problems in the field are often referred to as a replication crisis. The problems within social psychology, which tries to explain how humans affect each other mentally, have been pointed to in particular. But other areas, such as clinical psychology, also appear to be affected.
The well-known statistician and science critic John Ioannidis wrote in 2022 that most of the documentation we have on psychotherapy is highly distorted.
[...] Joar Øveraas Halvorsen is a specialist in clinical psychology and an associate professor at NTNU. He also believes that many of the studies in psychology are of poor quality. This in turn leads to a lot of the knowledge in the field being less reliable.
“We can say very few things with any great degree of certainty in my field. A significant proportion of what I learned as an undergraduate in psychology in 2001 has since been shown not to hold water,” he says.
[...] Jan Ivar Røssberg is professor of psychiatry at the University of Oslo and a senior physician in psychiatry at Oslo University Hospital. He has conducted many psychotherapy studies and is well acquainted with the research in the field.
He also confirms the research problems. “You have to look far and wide for studies where the researcher’s own beliefs don’t win out. I only know of one study where the researcher's own method ended up as the least effective one,” says Røssberg... (MORE - missing details)