Psychology is crumbling

[andresimon]

What is wrong with it being narratives spun together? Arent most things? What decides legitimacy?

What do you mean about how little of it there is? I do not understand how you consider it a sliver of knowledge, I've been reading books on the topic for years, pretty much every time I finish one I begin another and I know that I could not finish all the books I've got to read on it in my life time and there are new material published every day.

What do you mean mathematically rigorous and why is that important? Surely you appreciate that even mathematics lack rigor, that Bertrand Russell's attempt to lend it some nearly drove him crazy and he wound up acknowleding that all he'd done was provide one more set of axioms upon which it was based.

Because mathematics is the only logical language. It can cannibalize and/or destroy some of its old work but for the most part it builds axiom upon axiom. Very little mathematical rigor in psychology.

 

[tkae.]

1.) "Ego depletion" is only relevant to a psychodynamic perspective of psychology, which would argue that testing and experimentation are poor ways of observing the viability of a theory since experimentation is based on observation and psychodynamic psychology is based on the concept of psychological processes that are by definition unobservable. Psychoanalysts would consider Empirical tests of psychodynamic forces to be like testing water pressure with a ruler.

1.a) The concept of ego depletion could easily be translated or transposed into concepts from other perspectives, particularly cognitive psychology's theories of working memory capacity, cognitive load, and burnout, all of which are Empirically proven given that cognitive psychology is based on experimentation and observation.

2.) I don't mean to be judgmental, but if you think any of Freud's theories are fundamental to modern psychology, you're 60 years out of touch. Very few of Freud's theories remain intact even among psychoanalysts, who have transitioned to more modern theories developed by Brenner (modern conflict theory), object relations theory (Klein), interpersonal psychoanalysis (Fromm and Horney and other Neo-Freudians who directly attacked Freud's drive theory), etc. And that's just people who believe in psychoanalytical psychology. There's the Freud-Jung divide, Freud's split with Adler, and that's only the theories within psychodynamic psychology that rejected ego depletion and drive theory back in the 1940s. You have behavioral psychologists, humanists, cognitive psychologists, socio-cultural psychologists, biological psychologists...

2.a) Psychology isn't even remotely falling apart just because one out-dated theory from a largely left-behind "psychologist" didn't withstand a test that it disagrees with at a fundamental level. I'm not saying Freud didn't provide a meaningful perspective to the human mind or even that he's wrong. But his intention was to create a way of understanding the mind where the medical explanations fell short of what he observed in some of his patients as a neurologist. It's a trans-medical, philosophical explanation that DOES have elements that can be translated into other theories from other perspectives. But that's the thing. There are many perspectives to psychology that are fundamentally opposed to each other. And when I say fundamentally, I mean each perspective has a distinctly different way of defining what psychology even is, yet alone what the "mind" is or how it works.

 

[Swivelinglight]

Ego depletion was not psychodynamic. One of the primary premises of ego depletion was that we use energy and run out of it. This isn't a subconscious force. One study even said that we use up glucose and that drinking a glass of lemonade would restore your willpower and energy. This is literally psychology falling apart. This is one of the major branches of psychology and now all of it is completely wrong.

Baumeister used the term ego depletion as a homage to Freud, but the idea hardly has anything to do with the original in foundation. Nowhere does the original study attempt to answer whether the phenomenon is due to unconscious forces. This energy was never said to be physical or mental. In fact I'd say this is more COGNITIVE psychology than it is psychodynamics.

edit: actually it is cognitive psychology

 

[tkae.]

Ego depletion was not psychodynamic. One of the primary premises of ego depletion was that we use energy and run out of it. This isn't a subconscious force. One study even said that we use up glucose and that drinking a glass of lemonade would restore your willpower and energy. This is literally psychology falling apart. This is one of the major branches of psychology and now all of it is completely wrong.

Baumeister used the term ego depletion as a homage to Freud, but the idea hardly has anything to do with the original in foundation. Nowhere does the original study attempt to answer whether the phenomenon is due to unconscious forces. This energy was never said to be physical or mental. In fact I'd say this is more COGNITIVE psychology than it is psychodynamics.

Which major branch? Because last I checked, there was no "willpower psychology". Also last I checked, the loss of ego depletion does jack shit to disprove any of the psychology I deal with. Psychology is so multi-facted you can't just say that "psychology" is debunked short of some finding that the brain isn't the driving organ of the body.

You are SERIOUSLY overestimating the impacts of this theory, both within social psychology and especially within psychology in general. I can already think of three alternative theories for self-control off the top of my head: Skinner's operant conditioning theories and his primary methods for self-control, Mischel's studies on delayed gratification (he even gave Stephen Colbert some French marshmallows), and the Mischel-Shoda theory of a Cognitive-Affective Personality System.

If in the five minutes of writing this post I can replace it with three alternatives, how is psychology "crumbling" as a discipline?

 

[Swivelinglight]

Which major branch? Because last I checked, there was no "willpower psychology". Also last I checked, the loss of ego depletion does jack shit to disprove any of the psychology I deal with. Psychology is so multi-facted you can't just say that "psychology" is debunked short of some finding that the brain isn't the driving organ of the body.

You are SERIOUSLY overestimating the impacts of this theory, both within social psychology and especially within psychology in general. I can already think of three alternative theories for self-control off the top of my head: Skinner's operant conditioning theories and his primary methods for self-control, Mischel's studies on delayed gratification (he even gave Stephen Colbert some French marshmallows), and the Mischel-Shoda theory of a Cognitive-Affective Personality System.

If in the five minutes of writing this post I can replace it with three alternatives, how is psychology "crumbling" as a discipline?

It's crumbling as a discipline because it had hundreds of studies verifying it and a meta analysis saying that the phenomenon exists. This is one of that pillars of truth in psychology and it's not true. What else isn't true? Psychology has an issue with p-hacking and studies that find nothing not being published. Couple that with the huge desire to get published there's a lot of shoddy science going down in psychology. It's not unlikely that other things we believe that are true in psychology are actually not the case. Or as inzlicht put it 'At some point we have to start over and say, This is Year One". To read more about what's going on I recommend checking the links I posted in the original post.

 

[Lark]

Ego depletion was not psychodynamic. One of the primary premises of ego depletion was that we use energy and run out of it. This isn't a subconscious force. One study even said that we use up glucose and that drinking a glass of lemonade would restore your willpower and energy. This is literally psychology falling apart. This is one of the major branches of psychology and now all of it is completely wrong.

Baumeister used the term ego depletion as a homage to Freud, but the idea hardly has anything to do with the original in foundation. Nowhere does the original study attempt to answer whether the phenomenon is due to unconscious forces. This energy was never said to be physical or mental. In fact I'd say this is more COGNITIVE psychology than it is psychodynamics.

edit: actually it is cognitive psychology

That is weird because I only ever heard of it as originating within psychodynamics or depth psychology, whether it is libido or attachment style or relational style.

Its always an incorporeal kind of life force or psychic drive.

 

[Lark]

It's crumbling as a discipline because it had hundreds of studies verifying it and a meta analysis saying that the phenomenon exists. This is one of that pillars of truth in psychology and it's not true. What else isn't true? Psychology has an issue with p-hacking and studies that find nothing not being published. Couple that with the huge desire to get published there's a lot of shoddy science going down in psychology. It's not unlikely that other things we believe that are true in psychology are actually not the case. Or as inzlicht put it 'At some point we have to start over and say, This is Year One". To read more about what's going on I recommend checking the links I posted in the original post.

Why isnt it true though?

If you apply the wrong sorts of testing criteria you're going to get different results, every study ought to have clear limitations and delimitations, some things can be known while other things need to wait for other insights first or testing tools and mechanisms.

A lot of psychology is supposed to be invalid because its not falsifiable in the ways Popper or Einstein suggested were the proof of scientific knowledge, I've heard lots and lots of conclusions this way, like when cognitivists were absolutely certain that computer AI proved that the human unconscious did not exist and it was a misnomer for automatic processes like circulation and breathing but in time those very ideas made a come back.

Consider Freud's idea about kid's magic wax writing tablets and how after writing and overwriting and overwriting there are traces and dents left on the backplate and then consider phenomenons like junk data and programming errors in computer AI, similar no?

Unfortunately a lot of this is caused by schisms and sectarianism in various schools of thought and inability to communicate, then throw intergenerational struggles into the mix and how knowledge is/isnt transfered across generations, the whole tradition/innovation thing and all that is before you consider things like mutant strains of thinking, chinese whispers etc.

And even if you accepted, for a moment, the whole "it has literary merit but it is no science" or "it is art not science", so what? Are you deriding literature or art? Cause those things are vitally important to human life and survival, you know?

 

[Bush]

Blown out of proportion. Completely.

Pretty much every field on the planet has had at least widely-accepted phenomenon thrown off by new data and had every practitioner in said field look like a bitch.

How long was geocentrism held as the standard? It was more than 20 years, for sure. In the face of science in general, being wrong about something for 20 years is akin to someone stubbing their toe exactly once in their entire life.

Cosmology as a field didn't exactly completely die out because geocentrism was shred apart -- the field's doing just fine.

 

[Grand Admiral Crunch]

Psychology was invented for people to figure out whats wrong with themselves and other people. I don't think giving a name to all these disorders has done much good for humanity. They just keep inventing new disorders until we're all classified as sick. And the idea that willpower is limited just seems to discourage people from hard work, and will set humanity back. Psychology is for entertainment purposes only. Other than that, it is a scam.

 

[ChocolateMoose123]

So a theory in psychology is debunked....is this what the thread is about?

Psychology being a "soft" science, I would expect that would happen.

I don't see that being correlated to psychology crumbling all together. This thread doesn't make a whole lot of sense, IMO.

 

[uumlau]

Blown out of proportion. Completely.

Pretty much every field on the planet has had at least widely-accepted phenomenon thrown off by new data and had every practitioner in said field look like a bitch.

How long was geocentrism held as the standard? It was more than 20 years, for sure. In the face of science in general, being wrong about something for 20 years is akin to someone stubbing their toe exactly once in their entire life.

Cosmology as a field didn't exactly completely die out because geocentrism was shred apart -- the field's doing just fine.

I think the problem with psychology is more elemental than that of geocentrism or whatever clearly false physical beliefs were had at one time or another. The advent of the scientific method came during the enlightenment, and geocentrism was displaced by it.

The problem in psychology is that the scientific method isn't working the way we would expect it to, which indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with how the scientific method is being applied. It isn't even clear how you'd fix the methodology. There is a similar issue to which the video alludes in that much psychology research is conducted on WEIRD people. ("WEIRD" = Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) In Western culture, especially in Western universities, we tend to apply more abstract concepts to navigate society, e.g., that morality is (or ought to be) universal, not circumstantial, while other societies have remarkably different underlying principles. So are researchers finding universal human psychological traits? Or are they inadvertently applying selection effects that can only see certain psychological traits.

Physics (mostly) doesn't let you get away with such shenanigans, as discrepancies in theories and measurements generally point out things we don't really know or understand yet. String Theory is an example of a physics field that lets you get away with wild unprovable speculations, to a degree. Also, any field where predictions cannot be born out for another 30-100 years, is vulnerable to wild theories, because you'll be dead before you're proven wrong.

Without a good, skeptical feedback mechanism, psychology is going to continue to suffer these problems.

 

[Bush]

[MENTION=9310]uumlau[/MENTION] god damn it I had a cool thing written up but the internet ate it. Oh well

You're right in that geocentrism isn't a good example because that theory was in place before the scientific method itself -- and pretty much as soon as the scientific method was employed in the first place, that theory got taken behind the shed and shot.
_

Any psychologist worth their salt is well aware of the limitations of their findings. At the very least, the reputable ones aren't stupid enough to think that any of their studies taken from a WEIRD-based sample* represent all of humanity. That'd be akin to formulating a whole theory of gravity based upon what's readily available -- say, a bunch of balls, some towers, and some airplanes. That experiment can't even touch the stratosphere, let alone freakin' outer space. If a scientist actually does carries that one out, he needs to get all of his degrees revoked and get his ass planted firmly in Science 101, and his first assignment should be a 200-page essay on sampling bias.

Even after collecting a shitload of data, though, I don't expect to see a GUT with respect to, say, moral reasoning until a few millennia after we see a GUT for particle physics.

As referenced in the OP, Willpower: [subtitle], a best-selling book, relies on a botched understanding of willpower. The Secret relies on a hilarious premise that quantum mechanics proves The Law of Attraction. Sometimes pop psych books aren't exactly useful.


* or, worse; many studies sample the "psychology undergrads at one specific university" space -- not even WEIRDs.

 

[KitchenFly]

Interesting topic,. It reminds me of my hippy days back in my early twenties when I was a member of a Colt called Hart Light Celebrations.

They ran personal be elopement work shops and there was five work shops in all the first work shop which was the basic training was called Who Am I it ran for three and a half days and was a master peace in its own right it run circles around any enneagram or MBTI work shop I have ever partaken in. It was one of those rare psychodrama work shops that did what it was designed to do, it helped people transcend there limiting fixations that blocked the selfs own living light or personal freedom or inner happiness or capacity to emirate within the now moment free from the negative repetitive shadow self that limits the self to remain on the tree mill of pain.

Anyway to the point of the post. The second and third trainings were both went for six and a hard days and ran back to back one was called Being Training and the next was called Soul Training. The other two trainings the fourth and the faith training were add ons and were not as potent as the original three trainings Who Am I, Being Training and Soul Training.

All three training had the capacity to evoke change but to the cumulative affect being that each process built on to the following process and because it was hart focused or feelings focused transformation was easy to Acer if participants simply hone red the process.

Any way there were some amazing dyad proses I remember one from Being training that was about being present and focused just simply being were in there was a sound track that went for something like 2-3 hours with simple instructions like put you left hand on you right solder put your right hand on your right knee.. And on and on it went but it was amazing because demonstrated the shadow sides link to the ego and the resistance to simply Being though the exercise was obvious.

But the most interesting process that relates to braking down the egos boundaries was in Soul Training. Soul Training was largely based on a training techniques that NASA put the astronauts though as part of there training.

for five days we had to walk in a circles dressed in a brown cloth mock I think it was called like a long tea shirt it was worn to represent the shadow side and we covered our selves in asses from a bowl representing like how we simple walk around in life so to say wearing our shadow nature or displaying our shadow side as we make or way though life.

We walked around a large room in a circle with Avantgarde music playing continuously very loudly and we were asked or instructed not to talk to another or seek the attention of another or distracted another from the focus or there attention, we were all asked to simply observe our own shadow side as it kicked in and out of our focus of attention.

Well this this did not stop, we started Sunday afternoon and at 6pm or so we had some carrots stickers and wholemeal breed and a glass of water and then walked the circle with the Avantgarde music and the same objective, then at 1am we had three hours sleep and then back into it walking that circle watching the shadow run its stuff "fucukin fruit loop, why am I walking this circle for her amusement" was a frequent verbalised hidden complaint of mine as I walked the circle. Two hours sleep then,.

Day 2 walk the circle, sharing and, carrots stickers and wholemeal breed and a glass of water and then walked the circle with the Avantgarde music and the same objective, Dinner time carrots stickers and wholemeal breed and a glass of water and then walked the circle with the Avantgarde music and the same objective.

Day 3 the same but 1 hour sleep

Day 4 the same but no sleep

Day five was the day I had the most amazing experience it was as if the resistance of my shadow side or ego transcended and it was if there was a thin vale between personality and authentic self it was as if I viewed the space the clear space that the Soul resides that was only on the the other side of that thin vail as if that vail was the last remains of my resistance my shadow side, and because I was intellectualising or analysing it I lost the focus of the state, but it was a profound experience because I felt like I got the point of the training.

So my $1000. I though was well spent. Including Being training that allowed me to label the key energy of the mask that I presented to the would without an conches awareness of it, that was also worth $1000.

All up $2000. for two weeks of life changing personal growth it was worth it I still think. I don't think I would have the understanding about the ego and the shadow side and the masked we were if it was not for having partaken in those trainings.

Hart Light Celebrations shut up shop some twenty years ago now.

It is a bit sad that there doesn't seem to be any work shops out there that give a guided proses to process and transcend aspects of the shadow side of our everyday condition.

I always thought that if people did a Who Am I, Soul and Being training before learning about the nine energies and the MBTI people would experience of accelerated learning that would be profound for the individual.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Psychology is too vague in its nature to crumble.

 

[Bush]

Psychology is too vague in its nature to crumble.

Exactly.

A malleable structure doesn't crumble -- it morphs and shifts around as stuff gets tossed at it. That's the nature of every field that's in its infancy. It's not rigorous, tangible, or not-vague enough to specifically define, say, The Law of Human Dynamics or Zimbardo's Three Laws. It's fortunate that it doesn't promise that it holds such things.

If you nail down specifics this early, you'll kill yourself as a field.

 

[prplchknz]

this thread reminds me of this story: http://www.worldstory.net/en/stories/chicken_little.html

 

[Cloudpatrol]

this thread reminds me of this story: http://www.worldstory.net/en/stories/chicken_little.html

(Sighs contentedly) [MENTION=360]prplchknz[/MENTION] making a witty and salient point with a CHICKEN tale...life is good my friends

 

[Swivelinglight]

Psychology is too vague in its nature to crumble.

It's based around the scientific method. Apparently it's not doing a good job of doing that. If it's not doing good at the very thing everything it finds is built off of then it's pretty close to say it's crumbling.

 

[1487610420]

idk and dgaf bout psych fields, but, on an individual level, I think this can manifest. It's prob a complex, subjective and circunstancial, beyond glucose and more into inner compass thin. I've heard advice on automation and note taking/list making/planning menial/daily/weekly tasks ahead of time, in order to save the energy of decision making from small tasks to big ones.