The really big, splashy papers like the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram are partly well-known because of what bad science they are.
They're also 50 years old.
If that's your idea of what most of psychology is like, then I imagine you think 90% physics is all about things like phlogiston.
Just because there are some very well-known experiments that were very poorly conceived and conducted does not say anything about the field as a whole.
As someone who works in tech for a psychology department, I can tell you from a decade's experience that a) the people there care very deeply about performing good science, including replicating results, pre-registering papers, and doing good statistics (not p-hacking), b) there's a lot of psychological research that's decidedly unsexy, very much about things like proving what we already intuitively know to be true or sussing out small nuances between X and Y, and c) while they teach about Milgram and his ilk, it's almost entirely in a "What Not To Do" type of way.
SPE is still written about uncritically in psychology textbooks. If there are any criticisms, they're ethical criticisms rather than the fact that SPE was scientifically garbage. If physics textbooks still spoke uncritically about phlogiston theory, you'd have a point.
Thanks. Well, textbooks last copyrighted a decade ago, right as the reckoning in experimental psychology around the replication crisis was taking off. I suspect they may look different now.
When your life’s work and income rely on believing something, and you are surrounded by a tower of lies, it’s easy to avoid asking very hard questions. The replication crisis and recent situations of glowing NYT articles and mainstream acceptance of “scientific discoveries” like Power Posing never, ever would have happened in a hard science like math, physics, or chemistry. The “science” (I use the term as loosely as possible) is barely there and the entire facade is designed to extract ever more tax dollars in NIH and NSF grants. It is a mass delusion.
> never, ever would have happened in a hard science
If only!
Cancer biology has also struggled mightily with replicability, as has machine learning. Amgen could only replicate about half of the published findings in their reproducibility project; I’ve reviewed MLmreplications and the rate isn’t much better. Some of this is undoubtedly for petty reasons—-people run bad experiments, or put their thumb on the scale to get a particular result.
However, another major issue is that the “soft” sciences are actually quite hard. There are a million factors that might affect how an organism responds in a test. We often can’t control for all of them, and may not even know what they are. In a sense, electrons are easier to study. They’re all exactly identical, they only interact with each other in a few simple ways, and they don’t care at all about what you, the experimenter, might want or expect. Every patient (or rat) is unique and susceptible to all kinds of influences based on their interactions with each other, the experimenter, and the rest of the world. In that sense, the “replication crisis” just means we’re slowly and awkwardly discovering what matters.
It was on the softer side in Auguste Compte’s original 19th century definition, but things have moved on quite a bit since then. Platt’s famous article on “Strong Inference” explicitly calls out molecular biology as a success—-and does so ahead of physics! Storer calls biochemistry a hard science and botany a “medium hard” one.
The whole idea of a single, uni-dimensional spectrum of “hardness” is pretty silly, but even within it, the natural sciences (especially in the lab) are pretty unambiguously “hard”.
Milgram was unethical due to the severe emotional distress of many of the participants, and it was part of the impetus for the development of the modern Institutional Review Board structure and Informed Consent requirements for psychological experiments.
Its findings are somewhat less suspect than Zimbardo's in the Stanford Prison Experiment (which is now fairly widely panned as a godawful experimental design and implementation, even apart from its ethical problems), but it's still seen as a very big signpost saying What Not To Do.
They're also 50 years old.
If that's your idea of what most of psychology is like, then I imagine you think 90% physics is all about things like phlogiston.
Just because there are some very well-known experiments that were very poorly conceived and conducted does not say anything about the field as a whole.
As someone who works in tech for a psychology department, I can tell you from a decade's experience that a) the people there care very deeply about performing good science, including replicating results, pre-registering papers, and doing good statistics (not p-hacking), b) there's a lot of psychological research that's decidedly unsexy, very much about things like proving what we already intuitively know to be true or sussing out small nuances between X and Y, and c) while they teach about Milgram and his ilk, it's almost entirely in a "What Not To Do" type of way.