Sure, just read their professional literature -- it's a treasure trove of examples that confuse cause and effect. To a degree greater than any other field with scientific pretensions, psychologists ignore the possibility that they're reporting something that either has no objective reality, or is a case of correlation mining.
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
lutusp has strong anti-psychology sentiments. Conversations about it tend to be, uh, unproductive.
EDIT: It's a shame, because a lot of what he says about psychology and the flaws in the science is useful and interesting. Psychology has a lousy history of weak science. And any modern researcher could be making mistakes while striving for good science. So it's nice to hear from someone who does understand the importance of rigour.
> lutusp has strong anti-psychology sentiments. Conversations about it tend to be, uh, unproductive.
You know, you could address the topic, not the participants. To fail at this is the very definition of counterproductive.
> Psychology has a lousy history of weak science.
Yep. People have asked me why I focus on psychology, since all fields have embarrassing episodes in which the principles of science are ignored. The answer is that, although psychologists have clinics, they don't have enough science to justify their existence.
Sociologists are equally unscientific, but they don't have clinics.
Doctors also have clinics, but they're much more scientific.
This makes psychology a conspicuous gap in the system meant to protect the public from charlatans. But the gap is closing -- the director of the NIMH, the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, recently decided to pull the plug on the DSM and, by implication, psychiatry and psychology.
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
Show me that the majority of psychology (and sociology) papers published in reputable journals are unscientific, then publish that in a reputable journal (then just post the link to that article as a response to this comment). As that is what you are claiming. Anything less and you are being hypocritical.
You are making a very big claim, so go and do the work to back it up.
The studies cited in the Slate article come out of education and speech-disorders research. Those fields have problems too, but not all of the same ones as clinical psych.
