A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Psychology is in many ways built on top of problematic methodology which have led to conflicting findings and a broad replication crisis.
Not to mention nearly all psychological research is conducted on WEIRD individuals (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic). Usually college students.
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is pretty much the most empirically validated form of effective treatment for a wide variety of people, with a wide range of disorders / problems.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3584580/
It is also so straightforward that many people who are not in serious mental anguish / disordered thinking can just actually do it on their own after a few actual talk sessions, by following some steps and rules that can fit on a few pages of paper.
https://positivepsychology.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-techniques-worksheets/
I am not disagreeing with you though.
Much of the history of psychology as a field is built on theories that are not testable, do not allow for a way to do a test that would affirm or negate the actual validity of theory.
To add more fun to this:
Turns out the fundamental theory behind why SSRIs... work... is basically bunk, woefully incorrect at best.
Almost every single study on the efficacy of SSRIs in treating what they are prescribed to treat is either funded or conducted... by the people selling them, the drug companies.
And they almost never do long term studies, and they almost always massively downplay the severity and prevalence of side effects, which often don't arise until after long term usage.
Remeber when we had an opiod crisis because the Sackler family and other drug companies heavily pushed low quality research and recommendations onto doctors?
https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2021-067606
Studies similar to this one have become more and more common in the last few years, with it basicslly looking like SSRIs are either no more effective than placebo, or are nearly imperceptively better, just barely outside of statistically equivalent, or that they are better than placebo, but only for a completely unpredictable subset of people.
Psychiatrists have been very vehemently arguing about this crisis for the last few years, usually not in public, but uh, they don't like to state it as bluntly as I just have, because if it turns out SSRIs and many other mind altering pharmacueticals... don't actually treat what they are intended to, that they don't actually work in the ways they tell their patients they do... but do very clearly cause negative side effects... well that'd mean they've basically been doing medical malpractice their whole careers.
Whoops!
Hari Seldon entered the chat
Psych has many areas of study. Psychobiology, psycholinguistics, behaviorism, cog sci, borderline philosophy, defunct hx lessons in Freud and company, etc.
Cognitive science and behavioral economics have a fairly large overlap on a Venn diagram. There are also dual discipline individuals engaged in both mathematics and psychology.
Practical application and experimentation depend on what flavor of psych you’re engaging with. Dennet or even Pinker are going to read and be applied differently than, say, Kahneman & Tversky.
Vs, say, someone like Elizabeth Loftus back in the repressed memory explosion of the 90s.
How each area can intersect with experimentation is going to vary.
All of that said, who wasn’t fascinated by the idea of Asimov’s Hari Sheldon? I devoured those books in my youth.
Mental staticians.
People from static?
Uh, I tried to fix the word before posting and it seems I managed to leave it the same as it was.
I could read psychologists mind
But who controls the circumstances?