Psychology Fights BS

I like the idea of psychology because it lets me anchor intuition about others in something more concrete. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a field so deeply susceptible to BS, psychology research is currently at the forefront of the reproducibility movement. Consider Ed Yong’s reporting work:

“Some people are concerned that this will damage psychology as a whole and the public will perceive an epidemic of fraud,” says Simonsohn. “I think that’s unfounded.” He notes that retractions are common in many fields, and cites the case of anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, who was recently found to have fabricated data in at least 172 papers.

“We in psychology are actually trying to fix things,” he says. “It would be ironic if that led to the perception that we are less credible than other sciences are. My hope is that five years from now, other sciences will look to psychology as an example of proper reporting of scientific research.”

It’s important to realize that much of scientific research is BS. At least psychology, unlike economics, has real experiments to reproduce!