• Philosophy and meta-theory

    Meta-theoretical myths in psychological science

    There is a lot of talk of “meta science” in psychology these days. Meta science is essentially the scientific study of science itself—or, in other words, what has more traditionally been called “science studies”. The realization that psychological science (at least as indexed by articles published in high-prestige journals) is littered with questionable research practices, false positive results, and poorly justified conclusions has undoubtedly sparked an upsurge in this area. The meta-scientific revolution in psychology is extremely sorely needed. It is, however, really a meta-methodological revolution so far. It has done little to rectify the lack of rigorous meta-theoretical work in psychology, which dates back all the way to the…

  • Philosophy and meta-theory

    Psychology is still WEIRD

    Psychological science is fraught with problems. One of these problems that has recently attracted widespread attention is the proliferation of false positives, which is rooted in a combination of QRPs (questionable research practices), including “p-hacking” (choosing analytical options on the basis of whether they render significant results) and “HARKing” (hypothesizing after the results are known), and very low statistical power (i.e., too few participants). Overall, psychology has responded vigorously to this problem, although much remains to be done. Numerous reforms have been put in place to encourage open science practices and quality in research. Another problem that has become widely recognized recently is that psychological research often makes inferences about…

  • New research

    The evolutionary foundations of worldviews

    When taking a graduate course on evolutionary psychology a few years ago, I thought a bit about the potential evolutionary bases of worldviews. I was specifically interested in the opposition between humanistic and normativistic perspectives posited by Silvan Tomkins Polarity Theory (more information here) that is encapsulated in the following quotation: “Is man the measure, an end in himself, an active, creative, thinking, desiring, loving force in nature? Or must man realize himself, attain his full stature only through struggle toward, participation in, conformity to a norm, a measure, an ideal essence basically prior to and independent of man?” (Tomkins, 1963). Evolutionary bases of of normativism and humanism Drawing on…