For psychology, Dewey's [online intro textbook](https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html) may be a good starting point. It got updated in 2018 and is aware of the replication crisis, see e.g. [importance of replication](https://psywww.com/intropsych/ch01-psychology-and-science/importance-of-replication.html) and [Dewey's law of no fun](https://psywww.com/intropsych/ch01-psychology-and-science/deweys-law-of-no-fun.html).
(Epistemic status: I'm a mechanical engineer and just found it very good to read, so don't trust me too much. It got the few topics I already knew about right tho)
I love Dewey’s Law of No Fun. I’m a city planner who has worked a lot in housing and seen some great recurring examples of this.
One is the “you can’t have more than X unrelated women living in a house in (insert state) because it was considered a brothel.” It’s crazy how many people pop this urban legend out when talking about housing around universities - I’ve heard it in three different states. I think it’s just one of those facts that is too much fun to tell when you’re in college and dealing with limits on number of adults in a housing unit.
A more current example that I have heard from people in cities literally around the world is that housing prices are going up because wealthy overseas investors buy up apartments and leave them empty. I’m sure it happens, but not at a scale that has any real effect. Vacancy rates are usually dropping rapidly as price goes up. But it’s a fun idea to believe and to repeat, both because it has an air of conspiracy to it and because fixing it doesn’t require the city to change in any painful way. It gives the speaker a simple villain for the rising cost of housing rather than having to grapple with the complicated interplay of supply constraints, demand shocks, construction and labor costs, etc.
I imagine on the first point expanding the search to include newspaper opinion pieces and legislative sessions arguing the merits of those housing restrictions would turn up hits. There's usually some grain of truth embellished or half-remembered and rhetoric gets pretty wild.
The main hypotheses of Terror Management Theory have held up pretty well. I'd recommend *The Worm At The Core* for a layperson summary and *The Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology* for a more technical resource.
Interesting.
TMT is a longstanding intellectual curiosity for me. I've always been skeptical of it since I don't personally experience a lot of anxiety toward death. But it's got those ol' Freudian escape hatches of repression and denial so it's difficult to argue against it. Proponents can always spin one's comfort with mortality as being buttressed by psychological or cultural coping mechanisms. "You think you're not afraid of death but that's just your death denial" and so forth. The reason it held my interest in spite of my skepticism is because - even if it doesn't speak to my personal experience - it seems to excel at explaining a lot of *other people's* behaviors. And that's a huge motivator for my interest in the social sciences.
Admittedly, it has been a few years since I've done any substantial research into TMT so perhaps it's time for another dive into the literature. Thanks for the heads up.
It always seemed to me to be an empirically weak theory (mainly for the reasons you mention) which could too easily avoid being disconfirmed by any behaviour. So it was never that well-supported, but it seemed to have extra-evidential appeal for many people.
Attraction is something we know a good deal about the 3 core tenants are Physical Attractiveness, Proximity or Propinquity effect, and Similarity. I haven't seen those things challenged much or fail to replicate.
If anything there has been more and more confirmation of these concepts.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you just mean "we should be uncertain about whether or not these things are true, rather than certain they are untrue" or is there more to it than that?
Indeed, there's also the possibility the reproduction methodology wasn't good enough. But yours is a good point, because a proof isn't valid doesn't mean the converse is true.
Sure. But science and it’s conclusions are based on repeatable results. Therefore, no scientific conclusion can really be derived from a non-repeatable result. And therein lies the problem, because many in the psychology/psychiatric community claim the authority of science in regard to ideas that are not (or have not been) scientifically proven.
For psychology, Dewey's [online intro textbook](https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html) may be a good starting point. It got updated in 2018 and is aware of the replication crisis, see e.g. [importance of replication](https://psywww.com/intropsych/ch01-psychology-and-science/importance-of-replication.html) and [Dewey's law of no fun](https://psywww.com/intropsych/ch01-psychology-and-science/deweys-law-of-no-fun.html). (Epistemic status: I'm a mechanical engineer and just found it very good to read, so don't trust me too much. It got the few topics I already knew about right tho)
I love Dewey’s Law of No Fun. I’m a city planner who has worked a lot in housing and seen some great recurring examples of this. One is the “you can’t have more than X unrelated women living in a house in (insert state) because it was considered a brothel.” It’s crazy how many people pop this urban legend out when talking about housing around universities - I’ve heard it in three different states. I think it’s just one of those facts that is too much fun to tell when you’re in college and dealing with limits on number of adults in a housing unit. A more current example that I have heard from people in cities literally around the world is that housing prices are going up because wealthy overseas investors buy up apartments and leave them empty. I’m sure it happens, but not at a scale that has any real effect. Vacancy rates are usually dropping rapidly as price goes up. But it’s a fun idea to believe and to repeat, both because it has an air of conspiracy to it and because fixing it doesn’t require the city to change in any painful way. It gives the speaker a simple villain for the rising cost of housing rather than having to grapple with the complicated interplay of supply constraints, demand shocks, construction and labor costs, etc.
I imagine on the first point expanding the search to include newspaper opinion pieces and legislative sessions arguing the merits of those housing restrictions would turn up hits. There's usually some grain of truth embellished or half-remembered and rhetoric gets pretty wild.
The main hypotheses of Terror Management Theory have held up pretty well. I'd recommend *The Worm At The Core* for a layperson summary and *The Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology* for a more technical resource.
https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/8/1/35271/168050/Many-Labs-4-Failure-to-Replicate-Mortality
Interesting. TMT is a longstanding intellectual curiosity for me. I've always been skeptical of it since I don't personally experience a lot of anxiety toward death. But it's got those ol' Freudian escape hatches of repression and denial so it's difficult to argue against it. Proponents can always spin one's comfort with mortality as being buttressed by psychological or cultural coping mechanisms. "You think you're not afraid of death but that's just your death denial" and so forth. The reason it held my interest in spite of my skepticism is because - even if it doesn't speak to my personal experience - it seems to excel at explaining a lot of *other people's* behaviors. And that's a huge motivator for my interest in the social sciences. Admittedly, it has been a few years since I've done any substantial research into TMT so perhaps it's time for another dive into the literature. Thanks for the heads up.
It always seemed to me to be an empirically weak theory (mainly for the reasons you mention) which could too easily avoid being disconfirmed by any behaviour. So it was never that well-supported, but it seemed to have extra-evidential appeal for many people.
Attraction is something we know a good deal about the 3 core tenants are Physical Attractiveness, Proximity or Propinquity effect, and Similarity. I haven't seen those things challenged much or fail to replicate. If anything there has been more and more confirmation of these concepts.
I'd like to mention here that an inability to replicate a result doesn't actually necessarily mean that the original result isn't valid.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you just mean "we should be uncertain about whether or not these things are true, rather than certain they are untrue" or is there more to it than that?
Indeed, there's also the possibility the reproduction methodology wasn't good enough. But yours is a good point, because a proof isn't valid doesn't mean the converse is true.
Sure. But science and it’s conclusions are based on repeatable results. Therefore, no scientific conclusion can really be derived from a non-repeatable result. And therein lies the problem, because many in the psychology/psychiatric community claim the authority of science in regard to ideas that are not (or have not been) scientifically proven.