Megapod: Why Is There So Much BS in Psychology?

In the last decade, several major findings in social psychology have turned out to be hogwash—or, worse, even fraud. This has become widely known as psychology’s “replication crisis.” Perhaps you have heard of power poses—based on a study finding that subjects reported stronger “feelings of power” after they posed, say, with their hands on their hips for several minutes. But that finding did not replicate. Or perhaps you have heard of ego depletion—the more famous assertion that, when people make a bunch of decisions, it exhausts their ability to make future decisions. Again: did not replicate.

“There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years,” social psychologist Adam Mastroianni has written. “We’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers, and then what? The stack of papers just gets taller? I’ve never come up with satisfying answers. But now I finally understand why.”

Today’s episode features two interviews. First, I talk to Adam about his big-picture critique of his own field: how psychology too often fails as a science, and what it can do better. Second, we speak with journalist Dan Engber from The Atlantic, who has been reporting on a billowing scandal in psychology that has enveloped several business school stars—and raised important questions about the field. What is psychology for? What would progress in psychology mean? And how can this field—which might be the discipline I follow more than any other in academia—become more of a science?

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Links:

“Is Psychology Going to Cincinnati?” by Adam Mastroianni

“I’m So Sorry for Psychology’s Loss, Whatever It Is” by Adam Mastroianni

“The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger” by Daniel Engber

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Adam Mastroianni about what drew him to psychology and the field’s most relevant theories in everyday life. 

Derek Thompson: So we are about to engage in what I hope will be a really fun and adventurous critique of the field of psychology. But I want to begin by saying some nice things about psychology, starting with, why did you become a psychologist? Was there a moment in a classroom, reading a book, watching people at a high school party, where you thought, “Holy shit, this is it. This is how I have to spend the rest of my life”?

Adam Mastroianni: Yes. I remember the moment very specifically, I was taking a social psychology class. We were reviewing for the midterm and playing a Jeopardy! game to review, and I answered one of the bottom-row questions, the ones that are supposed to be the hardest. And the graduate student who was leading this review session looked at me and was like, “You’re pretty good at this.” And I was like, “Me? Good?” And then I thought, like, “Oh, I do work pretty hard at this. That must mean that I like it.” That’s what self-perception theory would say, that you can infer your preferences from looking at your behaviors as if you’re observing yourself from the outside. And I was like, “Oh, maybe I should be a psychologist.”

And around that time, I got an email that there’s this psychologist named Dan Gilbert who’s looking for research assistants for the summer. And I had just read his book, which is about how we’re really bad at predicting what makes us happy. And I was like, “This guy lives on earth? You can go hang out with him and you can do this stuff with him?” And I did. And it was so much fun to run studies about, like, “Oh, you think this is how you’re going to feel? Well, we’ll find out if that is really how you feel.” It felt like opening a back door to the mind. I don’t understand how anybody does anything else.

Thompson: What do you think is the most important thing that the field of psychology has done for human knowledge?

Mastroianni: I think it’s done a really good job at overturning our folk psychology. So before there was science, humans had to make sense of the world somehow. And we made sense of it with what psychologists now call folk intuitions, folk theories. So you got your folk psychology, your folk biology, your folk physics. And I think our folk psychology, of all of these, is the thickest and the deepest because we need to know the most about how other humans behave and how they work and how ourselves work, as well. You don’t need to know that much physics to get through life. You need to know enough to not fall off a cliff or run your SUV into a bunch of pedestrians. But other people are really complicated, and there’s a lot you need to know about them. And so we develop all of these rules of thumb or all of these general theories about other people that now that we have a thing called science, we can test.

And this is where I think psychology has been really successful, is taking these things, eliciting these beliefs that we have and putting them to the test. That’s what brought me in in the first place is like, “Oh, we have this theory that when bad things happen to us, we’ll be sad forever.” And then it turns out that’s not true, that remarkably quickly, you go back to feeling the way that you always feel. That to me felt like a revelation, and it felt like a permanent upgrade to my life to know that. I think that’s what we’ve done really well, and that’s how we’ve benefited humanity.

Thompson: You write that if we had to boil down everything that psychology and, in particular, social psychology has figured out about the human mind, all that knowledge really fits into two buckets that you call proto-paradigms. The first proto-paradigm is cognitive bias. What is it that we’ve fundamentally uncovered here? And how long have we been at it?

Mastroianni: So I think we’ve been at this, generously, for, like, 50 years. So a lot of people would start this history with Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky publishing their landmark papers in the ’70s about heuristics and biases, and that created a whole field. And that went on to win basically two different Nobel Prizes, not even in psychology, because there isn’t one. These ideas won Nobel Prizes in economics because that’s the closest thing. It’s really cool. And you can tell because everybody knows about it. People know those words. People know about the availability heuristic. These are things that if you wanted to entertain people by telling them about them, they’d be like, “We’ve heard all this before.”

Thompson: Do you have a favorite? Do you have a favorite Kahneman-Tversky bias?

Mastroianni: Yeah. The ones that I like the most are the ones that you can replicate in the course of a conversation. So, availability. Do you think there are more words that start with r or that have r in the third position. And people are like, “More words that start with r.” But it actually turns out there’s more words that have r in the third position. And it’s because it’s easier to think of words that start with r than it is to think of words that have r as the third letter. And this is a nice little demonstration that one of the rules of thumb that we have for estimating how common something is is by how easily it comes to mind. And this shows up not just in something silly, like estimating the number of words, but also estimating the danger of various things, like how safe is it to get on an airplane versus to get into a car. It’s easy to think of plane crashes, hard to think of car crashes, even though there are many, many, many more of the second one than there are the first.

Thompson: The second proto-paradigm that you say psychology has gifted us in the last half century is the concept that situations matter. What does this mean?

Mastroianni: It’s funny because now, it seems almost silly that that would be interesting. And I think it’s because of the success of this work. So there was a moment, maybe the entirety of human history up until we started doing this work, where people had a reasonable theory that there are just certain kinds of people in the world and certain kinds of people are capable of something and other people aren’t. And what this work did was essentially, through a series of elaborate pantomimes, show that you can create situations where people do things that you thought that only the craziest kind of people were capable of doing. The classic one here is the Milgram shock experiments from the 1960s, where, if people aren’t familiar with these, basically, you come in and you think you’re teaching someone in another room how to learn words, and you shock them when they get them wrong.

And through some stage-managing and sleight of hand, it actually turns out you’re not delivering shocks. But two-thirds of people in this study shocked someone basically to death, or so they thought. There have, by the way, been some attempted debunkings of that work that, although lots of that work from that time has been debunked, these I think have survived those attempts. And so, those I think really stuck around because they are such incredible demonstrations of the power of the situation. Oh, you thought that only an evil person was capable of shocking a stranger to death? No, it’s your neighbors. It’s you. In the right situation, you could do that. And the fact that now that doesn’t seem so surprising is because that work did so well at demonstrating that.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Engber
Producer: Devon Baroldi