Is social psychology self-correcting?

10/20/2015

I have a new essay up at Heterodox Academy discussing the claim that science is self-correcting. I also dig a bit more into what we mean by "bias".

As a reminder, Heterodox Academy is a motley crew of scholars concerned about ideological conformity and intolerance in modern academia. We're privileged to have Jon Haidt, Steven Pinker, Phil Tetlock, Judith Curry, Scott Lilienfeld, Amy Wax, Lee Jussim, Jarret Crawford, and many other outstanding scholars.

4 Comments

MikeR

10/21/2015 10:26:05 am

I work in one of the best hospitals in the country. Our Dr. Peter Pronovost has recently begun a program of seeking out and destroying causes of patient harm due to provider errors. His program is having remarkable success in other hospitals around the world.
He has found some very important causes of error, and found some good ways to deal with them. Would he or anyone claim that therefore there is no more reason to worry about provider errors harming patients? Of course not. We're just getting started, we've made a lot of progress, and as new sources of error are discovered we'll try to deal with them as well.
So too here. Jose Duarte is suggesting a form of error in science that is causing big problems. The right response isn't, We'll catch on sooner or later, and anyway, Galileo and Popper etc. have worked out how to do science. It's, How can we change our way of doing science so that this problem is avoided as well?
Actually, my comparison isn't so good: my hospital makes these kinds of provider errors rarely. Social psychology is so fraught with this stuff that lots of people don't take it seriously at all, sorry, social psychologists!

Throgmorton.

11/8/2015 09:00:02 am

The link to your essay, '"On the 'science is self correcting' idea" leads to a 404 "no results found" page. A search on the site for the post yields no results. It appears to have been removed.

Incorrigable Pedant

4/24/2017 09:13:06 am

"Social psychology doesn’t have a systematic account of these kids of research biases,"

kinds*

Incorrigible Pedant

4/24/2017 09:14:11 am

incorrigible*

Is social psychology self-correcting?

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José L. Duarte

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