They can predict behavior, but only for spherical brains in a vacuum.
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.
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.
The standard p value in most psych research is 0.05, which means that you are willing to accept a 1/20 risk of a Type 1 error - that you are content with a 5% chance of a false positives, that your results were entirely due to random chance.
Keep in mind that you don’t publish research that doesn’t give results most of the time. Keep in mind that you have to publish regularly to keep your job. (And that if your results make certain people happy, they’ll give you and your university more money). Keep in mind that it is super fucking easy to say “hey, optional extra credit - participate in my survey” to your 300 student Intro Psych class (usually you just have to provide an alternative assignment for ethical reasons).
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!
The issue with CBT is that there are populations that it is not effective for, but because it’s so easy to apply that’s what the majority of professionals are trained to (only) provide. It’s not trauma informed at all - there’s little understanding of how to treat trauma in general. (Considering that ~1 in 4 women and ~1 in 6 men experience sexual violence - why is treating sexual trauma not prioritized in research?)
I have issues with rumination, and CBT makes it substantially worse. I have told every professional that I have worked with that I know it does not work for me, and instead of respecting that, I get stealth attempts at it or they do end up giving me the fucking worksheets.
CBT also can work like a kind of gaslighting - ie, right now I’m terrified of leaving the house because my drivers license is now invalid by state law and EO - my county’s jail has killed quite a few people and a little gay trans man like me is not going to do well. I can’t “replace” that thought with a better one. Ranking how I feel about that just makes me more freaked out.
Pure psychology research definitely has its methodological and rigour issues that cast doubt on all its findings. However I think working psychologists in industry have validated psychological methods (A/B testing) and theories (dark patterns) for making profit at the expense of users’ privacy, mental health, time, and attention.
The biggest issue is that every brain is different, and you can’t slap absolutes on that. One study may be completely accurate, but with their specific sample.
Hari Seldon entered the chat
PsychologyPsychohistory
I imagine this as a bell curve meme, where nothing ends are, “psychologists don’t know anything,” but not sure what the middle is.
Here, let me fill it out:
low IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
average IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
high IQ: psychologists don’t know anything
But who controls the circumstances?
The rat. Or the pigeon. Depends on which one’s the subject.
The organism is always right.
E.g., Massive spike in repulse rate because the bird figured out how to jigger the machine? Clever bird is just maximizing food.
Mental staticians.
People from static?
I’m not a Scientologist, I am suspicious of psychology because I know it’s history. Sociology never suggested stabbing someone in the eye with an icepick, or create a psychosexualsatanic fantasy that gets innocent people put in prison. Economics never spearheaded a forced sterilization movement.
But their so much better today with the pseudoscience of IQ or the land of make-believe called evolutionary psychology.
I could read psychologists mind
