Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by MadWombat on Thursday January 16, 2020 @10:53AM
(#22065626)
Myers-Briggs is just about as unscientific as it gets. Neither Myers nor Myers-Briggs (her daughter) had any formal education in psychology or any serious experience. Their personality types are based on Jung's ideas that are over a 100 years old and have been long since discredited. There are no studies that confirm that MBTI type is predictive of anything. There are studies that seem to confirm that the dichotomies used in MBTI might not actually exist. Et cetera.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by tomp on Thursday January 16, 2020 @10:57AM
(#22065683)
Thanks for the clarification. I actually had the Big Five in mind - somehow I confused that and MB. Even there, I don't really have any idea if Big Five is "true" (stable and/or predictive) or not, I'm really just listening to Jordan Peterson here.
I'll edit the post above.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by NPMaxwell on Thursday January 16, 2020 @11:01AM
(#22065735)
Before you invest in the Big Five, you'll want to check on how much it can change your posterior odds, and compare that to results of investing time and money into other approaches.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by mattkrause on Thursday January 16, 2020 @12:07PM
(#22066469)
You’re looking too narrowly: psychology is much bigger than social psych, and a lot of the sensory or perceptual stuff has held up astonishingly well.
In addition the things NPMaxwell listed, consider these theories/ideas: Weber/Fechner’s law, parallel vs. serial visual search, categorical perception, attentional selection, semantic priming, the coarticulation of phonemes, spatial frequency channels, and properties of sensory receptors, to name a few.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by NPMaxwell on Thursday January 16, 2020 @10:59AM
(#22065709)
Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? That's a good question. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list: Rescorla-Wagner, Pavlovian learning, Habituation, failure to thrive, opponent processes, dominance hierarchies, learned helplessness, one-trial learning of disgust, avoidance theory of phobia, short-term vs. long-term memory, chunking, the hypergeometric forgetting curve, public inhibition of non-dominant behaviors.
A challenge for Psychology in the U.S. is that Statistics is usually included in the curriculum in Spring of Senior year -- an after-thought. I've been off-and-on poking at creating a course that would put statistics immediately after Intro Psych.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by krick on Thursday January 16, 2020 @10:30AM
(#22065396)
The likes of the author of the article will surely claim that there are, but that's what another "expert" few years/decades from now will be writing review on.
Re:How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
by mattkrause on Thursday January 16, 2020 @12:15PM
(#22066555)
We’ve known about the Purkinje Effect, which causes reds to appear darker in dim light, for over 200 years, and molecular and circuit mechanisms are now pretty well understood.
I’d bet a kidney we still believe it in another 20 years.
This seems to happen often. Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? AFAIK only IQ and (possibly) the "Big Five" personality traits.
Short list of (likely) "failed" (pop-)psychological theories:
- stereotype threat [1]
- implicit bias - specifically refers to unconscious prejudice that exist independently of any explicit / conscious bias; however, measurements of implicit bias do not predict biased behavior [2] and therefore implicit bias training is likely completely useless [3] (this is not to say that explicit bias doesn't exist or that bigots don't try to conceal their bigotry)
- power posing, the idea that putting your body in a "power" position (a pose that projects confidence) alters your hormonal levels - even the original author no longer believes [4] that this effect is real (although I personally still think that "power poses" can have an effect on other people and how they perceive you)
- growth mindset, the belief that you can learn and improve (which I personally think is probably better than the reverse), doesn't actually result [5] in better educational outcomes (but can result in millions of dollars wasted [6]). The original researcher since came up with [7] a convenient concept of "false" growth mindset - "saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it" - but critics rightfully counter with (from the Wikipedia link above):
> "If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?"
and
> to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is entirely dictated by how hard you try and is nothing to do with raw candle-power flies in the face of more than 100 years of intelligence research".
- Stanford Prison Experiment [8] (where participants were knowingly acting out their roles and which was never successfully replicated)
- Milgram Experiment (which, although somewhat replicated, was recently criticized [9] that few participants actually believed the experiment was real - a potential issue with any replication attempts as well)
Hope I didn't mess up any links. This is based only on my completely amateur research of online sources, I'm more than happy to be pointed in the opposite direction!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype#Statement_...
[3] https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing#Replication_failu...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
[6] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180522114523.h...
[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-pr...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Cri...
[9] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-shocking-truth-of-...