60% of psychological studies can't be reproduced

[fractional slacker]

Sure many of you have read the recent headlines.
Any comments?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/results-of-many-psychology-experiments-cant-be-duplicated-study-finds/

[Magnetic Synthesizer]

Heard about this 6 months ago.

 

Anyone who's in psychology instead of neuroscience is wasting their time.

[Kevin Beal]

Anyone who's in psychology instead of neuroscience is wasting their time.

These are two different sciences. To say that neuroscience can replace psychology is as silly as saying that physics can replace chemistry. If you think it can, then you don't understand science, which is the irony of people who love to paint psychology as unscientific.

 

New sciences are developed in order to account for emergent phenomena. There are different levels of description by which events can be described. We could take sentiments such as yours and do away with neuroscience in favor of biology, and biology in favor of chemistry, and do away chemistry in favor of physics, to quantum physics to whatever gets smaller than that, string theory?

 

Most sciences in their infancy appear to be a waste of time to the people who don't understand why the science is needed in the first place. Great scientific minds are needed in psychology to help push it forward.

[Magnetic Synthesizer]

The method of neuroscience (aka, recording brains) will replace the old methods of psychology.

I think the method behind psychology is its essence and The thing that distinguishes it from neuroscience.

Also Neuroscience can be more broad, and deal with things which are outside of psychology ( so theres that)

 

My idea being, that if neuroscience is used to study psychology than it would replaces or updates everything theory in psychology. The change would be so big as to consider it a different era. Like Post-Neuroscience psychology and Pre-Neuroscience psychology. The way I see it, is that psychology is speculation compared with the reliability of neuroscientific data.

 

I do think psychology is important. I think that 'recording of brains' should be implemented even faster and studies based on 'recoridng of brains' be given more attention.

Since Neuroscience is more broad and not replacing the word psychology

New sciences are developed in order to account for emergent phenomena. There are different levels of description by which events can be described. We could take sentiments such as yours and do away with neuroscience in favor of biology, and biology in favor of chemistry, and do away chemistry in favor of physics, to quantum physics to whatever gets smaller than that, string theory?

 

Most sciences in their infancy appear to be a waste of time to the people who don't understand why the science is needed in the first place. Great scientific minds are needed in psychology to help push it forward.

I agree, the way I framed it overlooked that the word 'neuroscience' is not ment to be a replacement of psychology. But with such sound experiments made in neuroscience which have psychological conclusions. Those studies and psychological mentions are then are called ''neuroscientific'' at the expense of being called psychology.

[Kevin Beal]

The method of neuroscience (aka, recording brains) will replace the old methods of psychology.

I think the method behind psychology is its essence and The thing that distinguishes it from neuroscience.

I understand that you think that. This is a very popular position and the topic of many science fiction stories. But you are, in fact, incorrect.

 

This thinking ignores the first person subjective experience. Trying to reduce all scientific inquiry in psychology down to observable brain activity suffers from the same problem that behaviorism does. You're studying two different domains, imagining that they are the same.

 

In order to do good neuroscience, you need to have some understanding of biology. In order to do good biology, you need to have some understanding of chemistry, and so on. There is overlap in terms of knowledge, but what the science is itself, is the study of a domain, with it's own objects with their own features and properties.

 

The metaphysical basis of neuroscience is different than it is for psychology. Neuroscience is not a superset of psychology.

 

The objects neuroscience studies are brains, neurons, brain regions, electrical and chemical signals, the dendritic state neurons are in, etc.

 

The objects psychology studies are objects that exist subjectively as products of the mind. Things like feelings, thoughts and perceptions, and what are the causal relations that act on and are acted upon by feelings, thoughts and perceptions. It's establishing what makes a mind objectively healthy or unhealthy, and finding its origins, and discovering ways to treat it.

 

Should that involve neuroscience? Of course it should. But only insofar as it brings about a clearer understanding of these subjective phenomena. If it's not toward that end, then it's not psychology, it's something else. (Neuroscience borrows heavily from psychology, as well).

 

If you are trying to better understand and treat things mental, then you are doing psychology... Technically you could also be doing folk psychology or the philosophy of mind, things which establish the metaphysical basis of psychology, but you get what I mean. We're talking about a particular domain here.