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Comment by thayne

8 months ago

Psychology has a pretty significant reproducibility crisis.

From what I've seen as an outsider, a lot of studies are taken as fact without any confirmation with attempts to reproduce the results. And many results suffer from questionable methodology.

A big part of the problem is that doing psychology well is really, really hard. You are dealing with human subjects, which means there are a lot of ethical and regulatory constraints. A lot of experiments that might give you important insights are unethical and/or illegal. Getting people to participate in studies is difficult and expensive, which means sample sizes are often much smaller than they should be. And there are often significant biases in the population sampled (I believe most psychology studies are done on college students... often psychology students). And then there is the inherent complexity of the subject. Every person's brain is different, and finding general rules that apply to the incredible diversity of human minds is very, very difficult. And finally, I suspect that a lot of psychologists are not trained in statistics and experimental methodology to the same degree as scientists in "harder" sciences.