There are many improvements to be made in Psychology, but things are moving in the right direction. One example is culture changes within the discipline around data--more of it is being made available through Supplemental Materials and places like Open Science Framework.

Your question is very doom and gloom about Psychology, so I have to ask, what do you recommend as an alternative? Where should we look for guidance on how to design cockpits, treat social anxiety, teach our children effectively, determine who is guilty by reason of insanity, increase healthy behaviors, and try to figure out why we laugh? I know there are lots of weeds, but there are lots of fruits from Psychology too. People are messy and hard to study, and the rigor in Psychology is better than it was 20 years ago and it will be better still in another 20 years.

I guess we agree on the problems, but we couldn't be more different on the prognosis.

Dear Jake Slater King  

Good psychology is ethology -- and that is as rare as ever and perhaps more rare, since true classical ethology seems to have been abandoned by all.  By the way, I never think of those with psychological disorders; my topic is the human IN GENERAL and what is essentially always true of ALL -- NOT any special-type case topic.  (The "more 'stuff' the merrier" does not work for science when it is in  un-integratable states -- that pretty much speaks for itself, because intuition about such diverse things is never the answer.)  That  which is essentially always true of ALL is General Psychology (developmental/personality).  You have to be on my topic to sensibly address that; "things" (or combinations of "things") other than this is off-topic.

About psychology being better than 20 years ago:  I don't see it.  The best "stuff" today is no better than John Anderson's ACT* or Fischer and Pipp's neo-Piagetian "Skill Theory" -- both those from the mid-80s, looking at the better stuff .  Yet, those had FATAL flaws.  I have suggested the way out for these theories -- just read all my "stuff" in the "Human Ethology and Development (Ethogram Theory)" Project (assuming you may be interested in the defined topic).

To judge the prognosis, I judge only  the science and not only is it not better, but in several prominent instances it is less empirical AND yet less open to understanding, so they provide very poor direction -- they are loosing in both of the 2 major ways.  This is including modern systems with components with NO empirical (direct observation) REFERENTS (no specifiable relationship to ANYTHING directly observable -- i.e. proximate causes).  These "theories" are sometimes known to be NOT theory, even by their proponents, but rather: "frameworks" .  Read my essays here in researchgate.net for about all I have on that (about 60 essays, 120+ pages; to do so: see my Profile, and then Contributions, then read my Questions and Answers -- no need to detail and repeat here).

Dear Brad Jesness

To an extent, I can follow you when you express your dissatisfaction with the current state of psychology, namely developmental and personality psychology. Actually, psychology is still afflicted by several problems, such as fragmentation, conceptual confusion, artificial fractures, overuse of tabular asterisks at the cost of theoretical risks, and so forth. Even so, psychology, I think, is now a better science than it was a century ago and, probably, it will be in the future a better science than it is now. Is this not true of any science? I may be wrong, but I got the impression that you are not only satisfied with the present sate of psychology, but with psychology in itself. I truly apologize if I am wrong in getting this impression.

Your claim that " 'journals' and other pressures keep producing nothing but psychologists doing junk is an exaggerated claim at its best, because it is largely ungrounded and unsubstantiated. The same is true regarding your other claim that 2/3rd (of studies? theories?) do not hold up, and end up unreplicable. Have you really counted them? It should have been a difficult task! You also say, in your response to my colleague Jake King, that good psychology is ethology. I know that thanks to ethology we know a lot about non-human animals' behavior. But who is the arbiter who can judge if your claim is really a true claim? More to point, as I see it -- and I might be wrong -- it seems that you suggest that your project on Human Ethology and Development (Ethogram Theory) is unassailable and represents, say, a cure for all psychological diseases. Note,  however, that nobody is a good judge while judging his/her perspectives, viewpoints, and even theories. Needless to say, to offer a more complete answer to your legitimate questions and doubts would imply  on the part of my colleague Jake King or I to write a big and greater book. This is beyond the scope of my short answer to your interesting and intriguing questions. No doubt, you can criticize psychology. It was not clear to me why you criticize only developmental and personality psychology. Note, however, that developmental psychology would say that only a formal thinker could raise the questions you raise. And personality psychology could offer you the psychological reasons why you are so discontent with psychology in general, and developmental and personality psychology in particular. But it can be the case that I doing junk while saying this. Forgive me, if this is the case.

Best regards, Orlando

PS. Thank you for raising, say, "irritating" questions regarding psychology. I like irritating questions because their answer could lead us to a better knowledge of the unknown. I think that to look for the unknown is the main goal of all researchers, be they ethologists, psychologists, physicists, mathematicians, and so forth.   

Dear Orlando M Lourenço

Re: Your statement: "thanks to ethology we know a lot about non-human animals' behavior. But who is the arbiter who can judge if your claim is really a true claim? "  My claim, Professor Lourenco is talking about is: "Good psychology is ethology."

Answer: The judgement of my claim is the establishment and maintenance of empirical connections.  If it does that best (as true classical ethology could with any organism), then it rightly "wins". I do consider myself a formal thinker on this matter: see the consistency of my thinking, the justified assumptions, and the rules I prescribe for going about study (assuredly maintaining connections to present empirical referents (proximate causes))  -- that is my evidence for that part of the point.  I am willing to take responsibility here.

Re: 2/3rd of p0.05): Significance thresholds and the ...

Am I being naive in thinking that the studies you talk about in AI are in fact psychology experiments, which shows that psychology is producing stand up methodology and results? Perhaps, as with most field and with the history of psychology, there is a spectrum of great / fantastic work through to junk and even fraudulent.

Dear Thomas Goldstein

I was talking about A.I. doing the work OF psychology -- for its own advancement, but then psychology could use the findings as well.  Psychology otherwise would no doubt continue to do it standard studies (and "theorization").

I'll just comment on one piece here, I think what Dr. Lourenço meant by overuse of tabular asterisks is an over-reliance on null-hypothesis significance testing at the expense of using effect size measures that can be more rigorous, more informational, and less susceptible to type I and II errors because they dance around much less chaotically than p-values. E.g. confidence intervals. Here's a fun way to teach this to students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1RqHrZQ8 and Geoff Cumming's The New Statistics article (2014) captures this concern well.

I think we can all come together and be mad at how over-reliance on p-values degrades scientific discourse, right?:)

Dear Dr. Jake

Thank you very much for making it clear to Brad Jesness what I meant while speaking of tabular asterisks at the cost of theoretical risks. As you certainly know, the neo-Popperian Paul Meehl (1978, Journal of Consulting  and Clinical Psychological) cogently argued against an over-reliance on the null-hypothesis significance testing at the expense, for example, of using size effects measures. In addition, p significant values (e.g., p < 0.05, 0.01, 0.001) may be significant in statistical terms, but not in psychological terms. If I salvage a man who is drowning along with orther 50 men, I would not get a significant p value. This aspect notwithstanding, to salvage a human life when 51 risk dying is highly significant from a human and psychological point of view.

Cheers.

Dear Brad,

My point is really - is Psychology something that exists on its own, or is the reality that it spreads out across many fields, such as AI? If you take the view that Psychology is something very distinct and stand alone, then I can see how it could be easy to bash. However, if we take the view that Psychology is now part of many other areas, in a scientific capacity and also as a quasi science, then I think it stands up much more rigorously. I agree that it's important to look across disciplines and understand what is being done well by others and how we can integrate that or learn from mistakes in our own work.

Regards,

Tom

Dear Thomas Goldstein · 

I believe psychology should stand on its own and that it should be a science. These two aspects are related.

Very typically**, cross-disclipline "findings" are very unfounded in their supposed links; they are not really integratable, and those who put those various aspects of the "findings" together are just operating on intuition (there may well be a place for intuition, a natural necessary place, BUT that is never in such a very "top-down" role).   The way "levels" or "areas" are put together, they are not integrated and that is not science, nor will that ever progress to science.  It is part of the mess that has made psychology what it is today.

[ ** FOOTNOTE: There may be some non-typical exceptions, but that is where there are some clear explicit foundations for the linkages. ]

Without recognizing the two rather different types of intelligence, crystalized (memorized, rote) versus fluid (can bake bread, therefore can bake cake), no, there is no hope for a psychology of the mind.  

Rote is not the same as understanding - anything, no matter how proficient the parrot.