The Chronicle of Higher Education has a truly fascinating piece on scientifically questionable ideas foisted on the world by the psychological profession, many of which have made it into the popular imagination as unquestioned gospel. These include:
* Low self-esteem causes aggressiveness, drug use, prejudice, and low achievement.She states flatly that these have all been shown, by substantial scientific research, to be false.* Abused children almost inevitably become abusive parents, causing a "cycle of abuse."
* Therapy is beneficial for most survivors of disasters, especially if intervention is rapid.
* Memory works like a tape recorder, clicking on at the moment of birth; memories can be accurately retrieved through hypnosis, dream analysis, or other therapeutic methods.
* Traumatic experiences, particularly of a sexual nature, are typically "repressed" from memory, or split off from consciousness through "dissociation."
* The way that parents treat a child in the first five years (three years) (one year) (five minutes) of life is crucial to the child's later intellectual and emotional success.
Speaking as someone who believes that social science can be a valid, highly beneficial, and useful science, I'm always heartened to see this kind of thing. Especially from someone in a field like psychology, which has for years seemed both disconnected from reality and full of pernicious and destructive nonsense. I seriously hope that her essay helps push the field toward reform.
(Via the Curmudgeonly One.)
In my job, I'll take sociology over psychology any day. Thanks for the link, this will be very useful for me.
Along these lines, I remember the first day I talked to a cognitive psychologist, that is, a researcher ... I asked him why didn't he didn't become a clinical psychologist, that is, a therapist.
He said that studies have proven that people get better if you pay attention to them. The real work was in researching learning, memory, things of this nature.
I was skeptical, so I asked my therapist. Instead of denying it as I expected, he smiled and said, well, yes, basically, though he said something else that I don't remember because I wasn't paying attention.
Whoa here...I gotta rant.
You have to be careful here when you discuss "psychologists". There are several major branches of psychology and they vary wildly in their commitment to research and freedom from ideological cant.
Neurophysiologists are about as hard-core scientific as you will find in any field and the cognitive psychologists are not that far behind (I have a Ph.D. in Cog Psy). The "mushy" part of these fields is limited to figuring out how data on behavior are related to models of cognitive/neurophysiological architecture.
I've known many Personality and Social Psychologists who are honest and hard-headed in their work. I've also known more than one who simply used their title to promote an agenda (anyone who includes "Marxist Analysis" in their vitae is guaranteed to be extremely boring at a party).
I've also known warm, personable and honest therapists. I may like them a great deal but their "science" usually leaves a lot to be desired.
The worst of all are the Educational Psychologists. My Ph.D. advisor had a joint appointment in Psychology and Education so I rubbed shoulders with the Ed Psys for about 3 years. While usually well-meaning, "science" in educational circles almost always involves drawing bright and pretty charts about how their pet educational theory will change the world. Their idea of statistical analysis was usually recruiting a Cog Psy person to run SPSS for them. While I knew some who fought hard to bring real science to the classroom, they were a small minority.
I was myself involved in a pretty nasty fight between the hard-core reading theorists (my dissertation was on brain mechanisms in reading) and the "Whole Word" zealots. Whole word started with the assumption that children would be "bored" learning phonics and spun the entire rest of its "theory" from whole cloth. The "studies" purporting to show its effectiveness were slothful examples of how not to do human research.
All of the examples that you have given are from these last two categories of Psychologists (except the last, which no real Cog Psy person buys any more).
As for the idea that Sociology is more "scientific" than Psychology, that depends completely on what you mean by "Psychology". I rank Sociology about equal with the therapists. Compared with Cog Psy or Neuro, this isn't true at all: Sociology is merely descriptive and correlative at best.
Of course, it would help if I read the article first...