Estimating prevalence of transparency & reproducibility-related research practices in psychology (2014-2017) (2020 preprint) Hardwicke Ioannadis et al

If only that were true. There are pockets of sanity but overall the field is going at full speed away from any introspection. Which itself kinda makes the point, it's a bit lacking in introspection to pretend there is any meaningful introspection happening. It would be great if there were, just as it would be great if psychology actually behaved like a science, but that's aspirational, like most of psychological medicine.

The problem is even deeper than that, quite frankly, with stuff like FND and the weird goop of mind-body quackery that is encroaching every nook and cranny of medicine. It isn't just lack of transparency and reproducibility, there is outright quackery being promoted and essentially given as much effective power as the most reliable medical evidence with absolutely no accountability and the bar keeps getting lower to keep the pendulum of sanity from swinging back, to keep the escalation of commitment over absurd ideologies.

Real introspection would look at what the BPS model and its peripheral ideologies are doing and would call most of it straight quackery. When that happens there may be a shift from aspirational to practical introspection, but until then the field lacks the introspection necessary to even begin introspection into how well it's doing. Which, yeah, pretty ironic for the field that studies things like escalation of commitment, Dunning-Kruger and biases. Right now, recognition of the problem is about as significant as calling climate change a bit of a worry. The scale of the problem is much larger than even the few pockets of sanity recognize.

We are the canaries in the coal mine. And we are singing. And dying. But no one's listening. Not even those who say "watch for the canaries". Or most of them anyway. Introspect much further, please, our lives depend on it.

 

Hopefully this is a sign that Ioannadis will be turning more of his attention to psychology. I've been wishing he would eviscerate PACE for a long time now.