In the world of attempting to understand the mind, first we had Freud. A dedicated physician driven to understand and help people. He was correct about some things, like the concept of defense mechanisms. But armed with limited technology and the information from his time, he got a lot wrong.
Erikson followed in his footsteps and began to modify his understanding. While Freud believed that development stopped at age 12 with the genital stage, Erikson continued to explore the way the person changes as they age and he developed eight more stages. He also began to understand the social nature of humans – naming his theory the psychosocial theory of development. Erikson made a lot of progress. But like Freud, he too got much wrong.
As time went on, people continued to strive for knowledge and understanding. As thinking became more mechanistic, Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner made an attempt to see the human mind as a “big black box” with inputs and outputs. They tried to determine how to get the outputs they wanted. And with the development of behaviorism, they continued to make progress. It wasn’t that they were uninterested in how the brain worked. They just felt that given the technology and current knowledge, the answer of how the brain worked was beyond our reach. But the question remained. What was inside the big black box?
Psychology continued. It expanded. It grew. And as science and technology progressed, the hope was that psychology would too. But then academia changed. Ceasing to be institutes of learning and scientific growth, professors were incentivized to publish new research or risk losing their positions. Researchers focused on creating new knowledge instead of replicating existing studies. Studies that did not find the results researchers wanted were ignored. And researchers began relying on p-hacking and fake data.
The pattern continued – mostly invisible – until the 2010s when the phrase the replication crisis was coined, and the field of psychology had to face their history and recognize that approximately 30% of studies failed to replicate. And that the more cited a study, the less likely it was to be able to be replicated, as the more interesting studies tended to be less reliable.
Concepts that formed the basis of our knowledge were shattered before our eyes.
Our facial expressions do not influence our mood.
Ego depletion is not a real concept.
Thinking of concepts related to elderly people does not make you walk slower.
Making power poses does not increase confidence.
Looking at a picture of the statue “The Thinker” does not make you less religious.
Washing your hands does not make you less likely to justify your choices.
Writing how you feel about a test does before you take the test does not make you do better.
It feels incredibly important to understand how the human mind works. And yet, after the replication crisis, it feels as if we are starting from scratch again. Which is an incredibly daunting task, as so much of science is built on the shoulders of what has come before. And when we do not know which shoulders are strong enough to support new research, the future seems overwhelming and uncertain.
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