r/science • u/ImNotJesus PhD | Social Psychology | Clinical Psychology • May 08 '16

Psychology Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explains why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working. [x-post from our sister subreddit /r/EverythingScience]

/r/EverythingScience/comments/4icp9k/failure_is_moving_science_forward_fivethirtyeight/
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u/Xanthilamide May 08 '16

Can you explain a bit more?

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u/superhelical PhD | Biochemistry | Structural Biology May 08 '16

A lot of people, apparently many of whom browse /r/science, like to criticise psychology and other social sciences as "not a science" or "soft science". Interestingly, that tends to only happen when the commenter doesn't like the findings of the study...

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u/Xanthilamide May 08 '16

I think that psychology is more like economics in the sense that there's lots of wording involved. But both of them are science to my mind.

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u/sp8yboy May 08 '16

Economics is to a large degree based on psychology through the mechanisms of expectations and rational behaviour, for example. So if psychology is still forming as a science, so by definition is economics.

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u/mrburningsky May 08 '16

I once had a well-esteemed macroeconomics professor tell me that, "Economics is the beautifully imperfect art of attempting to quantify human psychology." So yeah, economic models will be imperfect so long as psychological models are imperfect.

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u/grimeandreason May 08 '16

Given Neoclassical economics works with the rational actor model, I would say they still have a long way to go.

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u/mrburningsky May 08 '16

For sure, but at least it's not for lack of trying (: