The error rate in replication experiments in the natural sciences is expected to be much much lower than in the social sciences. Humans and human environments are noisy and complicated. Look at nutrition/medicine—it’s taking us decades to figure out whether some substance/food is good or bad for you and under what circumstances. Why would you expect it be easier to analyze human psychology and behavior?
I think he is more suggesting that the number of confounding factors in psychology experiments is generally far higher than in the natural sciences. The addition of such uncontrollable factors leads to a generally higher error rate in human sciences.
The number of confounding factors isn’t that important if it’s possible to do controlled experiments that control for them.
Nutrition science has the problem that you usually can’t do good controlled experiments or those are very expensive.
Obviously if you can control for a confounding factor then its not an issue, I was simply stressing that the nature of human sciences means that it is effectively impossible to control for all confounding factors, or even be aware of many of them.
To the extend that’s true careful replication of studies to identify factors is important if you don’t want to practice what Feymann described as Cargo Cult science. If you follow Feymann argument physicists also would get a bunch of bad results if they would work with the scientific standards used in psychology.
Feymann on rat psychology:
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats.
Nutrition is really a different case than a lot of psychology. There are question in psychology such as whether doing certain things to a child in it’s childhood effect whether that child is a healthy adult. Those questions are hard to investigate scientifically because of time lag. The same isn’t true for many psychology experiments.
I don’t think we actually disagree on anything, the only point I was making was that your reply to Lightwave, while accurate, wasn’t actually replying to the point he made.
I did reply to his point. He spoke about nutrition science. That field has it’s own problems that psychologists don’t have to deal with. It’s a bad example if he wanted to make the point you think he wanted to make.
The error rate in replication experiments in the natural sciences is expected to be much much lower than in the social sciences. Humans and human environments are noisy and complicated. Look at nutrition/medicine—it’s taking us decades to figure out whether some substance/food is good or bad for you and under what circumstances. Why would you expect it be easier to analyze human psychology and behavior?
If you want to know whether food is good or bad you have to look at mortality which means you might have to wait a decade.
A lot of psychology experiments claim effects over much shorter timeframes.
I think he is more suggesting that the number of confounding factors in psychology experiments is generally far higher than in the natural sciences. The addition of such uncontrollable factors leads to a generally higher error rate in human sciences.
The number of confounding factors isn’t that important if it’s possible to do controlled experiments that control for them. Nutrition science has the problem that you usually can’t do good controlled experiments or those are very expensive.
Obviously if you can control for a confounding factor then its not an issue, I was simply stressing that the nature of human sciences means that it is effectively impossible to control for all confounding factors, or even be aware of many of them.
To the extend that’s true careful replication of studies to identify factors is important if you don’t want to practice what Feymann described as Cargo Cult science. If you follow Feymann argument physicists also would get a bunch of bad results if they would work with the scientific standards used in psychology.
Feymann on rat psychology:
Nutrition is really a different case than a lot of psychology. There are question in psychology such as whether doing certain things to a child in it’s childhood effect whether that child is a healthy adult. Those questions are hard to investigate scientifically because of time lag. The same isn’t true for many psychology experiments.
I don’t think we actually disagree on anything, the only point I was making was that your reply to Lightwave, while accurate, wasn’t actually replying to the point he made.
I did reply to his point. He spoke about nutrition science. That field has it’s own problems that psychologists don’t have to deal with. It’s a bad example if he wanted to make the point you think he wanted to make.
Well fair enough. His use of nutrition science as an example was probably poorly chosen.