It seems that psychology has always been about the atypical rather than the typical. In most other sciences, the goal is to hopefully build a useful model of the typical, and observations outside that model result in alterations to the model.
In psychology the idea seems to be to produce the inverse of that, yet there doesn't appear to be any particular end goal of producing the typical model, only in defining the atypical cases to the nth-degree. The result? We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago, but we have exhaustive lists of subtly different atypical models so encompassing that almost anybody could be recognized as having a psychological problem of some sort!
Describing a new disease (atypical model) is one of the only ways to get recognized in the field. But all the easy cases have been taken, so bizarre models seem to make the publishing rounds much more readily than new subtle delineations on previously recognized diseases.
In treatment this turns into quack and fad medicine like "I prescribe shared strip club night for marriage problems, with the idea that it forces couples to talk to each other about their sexual problems blah blah blah" or "Anger therapy" or "Primal Therapy" or other such nonsense.
I'd say that with the tools we have available today, that psychology is due for an Einstein level revolution, but I'm not sure that the field, internally, is ready for this.
It happened already 50 years ago, it just doesn't get any press. Pretty much everything I've been reading in the past few years (Kahneman, Baumeister, Baron, Stanovich, Wilson for example) will pass this with flying colors.
It is true however that psychology requires a bit more intellectual honesty then other fields. Mistakes are more subtle and easier to cover up, samples are smaller and there's always the excuse of different cultures. I'm really curious what this project will uncover.
Kahneman's getting a little more press lately, with a bestseller on the shelves.
His story is interesting - he was given a lot of responsibility at a young age, because he was doing officer evaluation for the newly-formed Israeli army. He has to produce real, repeatable results, and has a wealth of data to test his earlier conclusions, and perhaps the sheer newness of the entire enterprise makes it safer for him to be honest. In a few years he realizes the vacuity of his own psychological results, and by implication, many of the methods he's been taught. That's what kicks off his whole program of investigating sources of bias and error.
Would this have ever happened in a standard academic setting?
Quite possibly. Roy Baumeister has possibly the best thinking process I've ever met. He had the gall to approach a subject like this, and do it with flawless rigor: http://www.amazon.com/Meanings-Life-Roy-F-Baumeister/dp/0898... Too bad his latest book (Willpower) is coauthored with a professional writer... I miss his style.
You're referring to clinical psychology. However, most psychological research (particularly that published in the journals chosen for review) does try to build a model of the typical mind.
We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago
I can't take this statement seriously. Have you ever even taken an intro cognition or perception class? Almost everything is about how minds typically work, and all of the findings are less than one hundred years old.
Many years ago. Perhaps the field has changed or I had a lousy course. But most of it seemed to be about describing the edge cases where our brains produce false models or find wrong patterns in the world.
Of course brains produce false models and find wrong patterns. Modeling and pattern-matching is what brains do. So they're going to get it wrong a lot.
The interesting thing isn't how funny it is that the mind screws up sometimes, it's knowing the actual mechanisms of perception, cognition, memory, behavior, etc. Edge cases and failures are only the beginning of understanding, because they hint at how things work.
For example, visual perception is heavily based on detecting edges. So there are a set of optical illusions where you fail to accurately perceive the colors or shades of different areas (like the chessboard illusion), because the relative shading of adjacent areas is more important for producing edges and shapes in your mind.
> that psychology is due for an Einstein level revolution
The Behaviour Therapy model was that revolution. The old model had many sessions trying to uncover past trauma before allowing the patient to move on. People with a phobia of something spent many weeks talking about their childhood and their adult life.
Now a severe phobia can be cured for most people in about an hour. And it stays gone.
I'm glad that psychology studies are being given more rigorous scrutiny. There's been too much sloppy science in the field for much too long.
I am talking about "Systemic Desensitization" as developed by Wolpe. That helped form CBT.
The evidence base for SD and for CBT is pretty good. (It's a good treatment for depression, if applied by a skilled practitioner.)
Here's one link to a BBC Radio 4 programme about treatment of phobia using SD. (Might not be available outside UK, but there's probably some way of getting it.)
It appears that he is referring to cognitive-behavioural therapy, or CBT. The Wikipedia page is pretty good.
That being said, it works very well for phobias, but in other areas its about as good as all the other methods of therapy, which implies that its much more down to the meanings that a patient takes from the experience rather than the treatment itself.
In psychology the idea seems to be to produce the inverse of that, yet there doesn't appear to be any particular end goal of producing the typical model, only in defining the atypical cases to the nth-degree. The result? We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago, but we have exhaustive lists of subtly different atypical models so encompassing that almost anybody could be recognized as having a psychological problem of some sort!
Describing a new disease (atypical model) is one of the only ways to get recognized in the field. But all the easy cases have been taken, so bizarre models seem to make the publishing rounds much more readily than new subtle delineations on previously recognized diseases.
In treatment this turns into quack and fad medicine like "I prescribe shared strip club night for marriage problems, with the idea that it forces couples to talk to each other about their sexual problems blah blah blah" or "Anger therapy" or "Primal Therapy" or other such nonsense.
I'd say that with the tools we have available today, that psychology is due for an Einstein level revolution, but I'm not sure that the field, internally, is ready for this.