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New research on bullshit receptivity
The notions of ”alternative facts” and fake news have rapidly become viral. Although research on receptivity to falsehoods is useful, there is also a problem here. These notions are often used for ideological rather than scientific purposes—the real facts of the ingroup tribe are pitted against the lies of the other tribes. We need more research that focuses not on what facts people subscribe to but on how they engage with evidence and arguments, and how to promote a more scientific (as opposed to ideological or tribalist) attitude among the public. One interesting new line of research focuses on the notion of receptivity to bullshit, which the philosopher Harry Frankfurt…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The “happiness pie”, genetic and environmental determinism, and free will
Nick Brown and Julia Rohrer recently posted a new preprint titled Re-slicing the ”Happiness Pie: A Re-examination of the Determinants of Well-being that comments on an influential paper by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005) on the determinants of well-being. Nick Brown is the amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (together with the legendary Alain Sokal of the “Sokal hoax”). He has made a name for himself exposing shoddy work in positive psychology. This is another addition to this genre. What is particularly mind-blowing with this one is not just the sheer lack of intellectual sophistication of the criticized paper, but the fact that it has produced a whopping 3000…
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Our book is finally out
The book on philosophy of science and methodology for psychology that I have been working on together with Lars-Gunnar Lundh is finally out. Unfortunately, it is only published in Swedish so far, but I hope that we will soon be able to publish at least parts of it in English as well. If you happen to speak Swedish, you can access it from the publisher Studentlitteratur. The reason that we wrote this book is that we felt that there was no other book that connects philosophy of science with psychological science in a sufficiently systematic and non-polemical way (the best books in this genre tend to focus on the natural…
