Mick Hartley

Stuart Ritchie's article at UnHerd is titled Never trust a scientist, but it should really be Never trust a psychologist:

In 2002, a Harvard professor named Marc Hauser made an exciting discovery about monkeys. Cotton-top tamarins, to be specific. The monkeys, just like human infants, were able to generalise rules that they’d learned across different patterns. This was a big deal: if monkeys had this capacity, it would provide key insights into how human language evolved.

Except it was all fake: in the experiment, which relied on the monkeys looking in particular directions when shown certain patterns, Hauser had simply pretended that they were looking in the direction relevant to his language-evolution theory. They hadn’t been. When a research assistant questioned how Hauser himself kept finding the results he wanted when nobody else who looked at the data could, he turned into a browbeating bully: “I am getting a bit pissed here,” he wrote in an email. “There were no inconsistencies!”

And now there's another apparent psychology fraud.

Duke University’s Dan Ariely has written several books that made a big splash in the world of popular psychology and “behavioural economics”. His combination of humour and what appears to be deep psychological insight made them fly off the shelves. In 2008, Predictably Irrational provided an apparently “revolutionary” argument for why economists were wrong to assume rationality on the part of the average consumer. In 2012, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty used some of Ariely’s own research to explain what makes people break the rules. Ariely’s slick, charismatic TED talks have racked up millions of views. One of them, titled “Our Buggy Moral Code”, explains “why we think it’s okay to cheat or steal”.

Unfortunately, it seems someone involved with Ariely’s research thought it was okay to cheat. Last week, an in-depth statistical analysis showed that a dataset from one of his 2012 papers was, essentially beyond doubt, fraudulent. The study had apparently showed that people were more honest about how much mileage their car had done if you made them sign a “I promise this information is true” statement before they reported the mileage, rather than at the bottom of the page. But it hadn’t shown that. In fact, it seems no such study ever happened, and the data was just produced using a random number generator.

There does seem to be a problem with psychology. Freud was the first big name to dominate the field, but though his stink lingers on, it's generally accepted now that psychoanalysis may be a powerful system of thought, and it had an extraordinary influence in 20th century intellectual life, but it has nothing to do with science, and the man himself was a deeply flawed character. Was Jung an improvement? Well, read Richard Noll's The Jung Cult, or The Aryan Christ, to set your minds at rest on that particular score. The line between psychology and religion was never more blurred – except perhaps by L Ron Hubbard. 

Even those dedicated scientists who apparently eschewed the charismatic approach haven't worn well. When I studied psychology decades ago we had to read Jean Piaget in depth. Although credited as "the most influential figure in developmental psychology", no one pays much attention to him now, and his theories of stages of cognitive development in children appear to have been abandoned. 

Then there are all those famous psychology experiments that get constantly quoted. Stanley Milgram, for example. As I suggested a while back, Milgram set out to expose how nasty people could be when under the pressure of an authority figure, but an alternative and in my view more plausible interpretation would be that his experiment showed how nasty psychologists could be when determined to prove their point and further their careers. Philip Zimbardo, the other much-cited figure for his Stanford experiments, purported to show how brutality can arise from the set-up of social situations, but has had doubts raised about his integrity.

And let's not even start on the history of lobotomies and leucotomies and the like.

It's a grim catalogue. As psychiatry is to medicine, so psychology is to science.