Psychology, a Failed Discipline
6th July 2025
In my previous article, The Problem is Not Plagiarism, but Cargo Cult Science, I claimed that upwards of 90% of non-STEM academic papers should be classified as Cargo Cult Science. This assertion prompted a challenge from a HackerNews commenter who said I should “Pick a field and debunk it if you can.”
Sorry, commentor, that’s not the way science works. You have to demonstrate that your ‘science’ actually works, not the other way around.
To reiterate, Richard Feynman considers the main feature of Cargo Cult Science to be the following:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
That sure sounds like psychology to me. (Also economics, but let’s not go there.)
I’ve selected psychology as my Cargo Cult Science field of choice primarily because it’s one of the most obviously fraught subjects and due to my own brief academic detour into this field after dropping out of engineering (a very questionable decision in hindsight).
In psychology, papers are either p-hacked garbage that doesn’t replicate or, more commonly, have no scientific value due to their methodology or subject of study. These papers aren’t necessarily “false” per se, as much as they don’t produce any valuable knowledge by design, serving mainly to advance the careers of the authors through journal publications and the gathering of press and citations. I consider all these Cargo Cult Science.
While p-hacking and the replication crisis are widely acknowledged, albeit not solved, problems, I argue that these are minor compared to the four major issues that undermine psychology: reliance on surveys, disregarding indexicality, studying nouns, and using statistics.
This post will discuss the weaknesses in psychological research outside of clinical psychology. In a subsequent post, I plan to explore the problems with “mental illnesses” (especially depression) and their treatment.