The irony of the piece is that psychology's greatest contribution to science over the last several decades is probably meta-science, or empirical introspection about the scientific process itself.
Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere.
The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around.
What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come.
Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science.
Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.
Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere.
The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around.
What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come.
Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science.
Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.