The Internet loves the Rat Park experiment, but it never replicated and should be considered just as bogus as all the other stuff in social psych which hasn't survived the replication crisis.

It's fitting for this thread though, because it survives for the exact reason the alpha wolf stuff survives: people love the story so they hang on to it irrespective of the science.

Right, and we've seen plenty of people who lead the "Rat Park" equivalent of human lives and yet still get addicted to opioids. There's clearly no single cause.

I think 90% of my HS psych class didn't replicate

Can you elaborate more on this? I did not take psychology in high school, but I would imagine that such a course would focus on fundamental concepts where “replicating” wouldn’t even be an issue. There might be teachers who might bring up the pop-sci topics, but wouldn’t the meat of the class just be learning about theories or frameworks?

Not the OP and I didn’t take psych but here’s an example syllabus for AP Psychology from the College Board: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-psychology-s...

The first two units on neurology and cognition seem sensible, but I can see how it’ll quickly go off the rails after that.

This seems entirely fine, after a brief review of the contents. Where do you think it goes off the rails?

    > never replicated

Not exactly.

Wiki says:

    Studies that followed up on the contribution of environmental enrichment to addiction produced mixed results.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park#Further_experiments

> it never replicated and should be considered just as bogus

Did someone try to replicate it? What were the results? What were their conclusions about its credibility?

> all the other stuff in social psych which hasn't survived the replication crisis.

Replication isn't black and white: Most of the experiments - at least in the early widely reported phase - did replicate but with less statistically strong results.