The vast emptiness of social psychology
The marshmallow experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, cooperation breakdown in nature and tribes - all apparently bad science
Where social psychology has been used to:
- portray humans as dumb pieces of clay to be molded
- unduly indict groups that researchers dislike
- to provide convenient experimental confirmation of bits of popular wisdom (“power corrupts”, “evil is banal”, etc.)
- contraindicate views researchers call “narratives” but which are really ‘views researchers dislike’
- affirm the singular importance of small, unreliable aspects of human behavio
then it’s probably wrong.