Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine - by Scott Alexander

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Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine<br>...

Scott Alexander<br>Jul 28, 2026

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People act like the replication crisis has discredited psychology, that the field is now widely agreed to be a sham, that it can be uncontroversially held up as an example of science gone wrong. These statements are often made in the broadest possible terms:

🌷🐰 sonya serendipitously 🐇🎀@sonyasupposedly

"My intro to psychology classes was one of the most valuable classes I ever took"

oh no, who's gonna tell him<br>6:32 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 3.91K Views

6 Replies · 76 Likes

Science Banana@literalbanana

we very much do say that - every field infected with psychology needs to be quarantined and treated with science antibiotics https://t.co/cV8oxLkvzs

Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper

@MeganTStevenson I think this is a very important point and something I’ve talked about before. The humanities may be silly very often but the social sciences are doing large scale (and often expensive!) fraud on a regular basis yet no one says defund behavioral economics!

6:11 PM · Jul 18, 2026 · 9.51K Views

2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 85 Likes

This misunderstands the extent of the problem. The replication crisis primarily affected the sub-field of social psychology, and most centrally the sub-sub-field of social priming research - the study of how seemingly trivial interventions can have outsized effects on behavior.<br>Here’s the table of contents of an online Intro Psychology textbook (OpenStax Psychology, 2nd edition):

Social psychology - which includes social priming, power poses, nudges, stereotype threat, the Stanford Prison experiment, the Wansink portion size study, and everything else you love to hate - is in chapter 12 of 16. The other fifteen chapters are comparatively innocuous. Here are examples of the subheadings you get when you expand some of the chapters above:

Not all of this is perfect. I don’t think anything that “Neo-Freudians: Adler, Erikson, Jung, and Horney” said has held up very well (although to be fair, a person named “Horney” becoming a neo-Freudian is the sort of thing neo-Freudians would have predicted). But most of it is pretty good. Even “The Sociocultural Model and Therapy Utilization”, which sounds woke and cringe, turns out to be common-sense ideas like reminding would-be therapists that, compared to their usual social circles, a fundamentalist Muslim may have a very different response to learning that he might be gay.<br>And even Chapter 12 on social psychology isn’t so bad, including discussions of social roles, cultural norms, persuasion, conformity, groupthink, political polarization, ingroups vs. outgroups, and the psychology of love and relationships. It mentions the Kitty Genovese story and the Stanford Prison Experiment, but appropriately caveats them as historically important didactic examples which probably didn’t occur the way they were classically described. Its biggest mistake (from my perspective) is citing stereotype threat (not by name) without any caveats. Social priming is nowhere to be seen.<br>Is this because the textbook is post-replication-crisis and hastily removed all incriminating material? It might be (it’s from 2026), but I think it’s equally due to none of the incriminating material being important enough within psychology to make it into a 101-level overview of the field:

When you mock “psychology” or “psychologists”, you’re mocking:<br>the psychophysicists who study how the brain processes visual information

the psychopharmacologists who figure out what receptors LSD hits

the psychometricians who measure the genetic contribution to IQ

the personality psychologists who develop and refine the Five Factor Model

the experimental psychologists who run rats through mazes to learn how memory works.

the cognitive psychologists who ask you to read the names of colors in the color of other colors, then secretly laugh at you when you mess up.

the psychophysiologists who determine how hormones affect emotion

the forensic psychologists who assess whether criminals are not guilty by reason of insanity

the abnormal psychologists who try to find out what schizophrenia is

the clinical psychologists who treat drug abusers

the industrial psychologists who advise companies on factors affecting productivity and job satisfaction.

the child psychologists who investigate how babies learn language / ethics / abstract concepts / etc.

the behaviorist psychologists who give pigeons increasingly complex sequences of food and electric shocks to study reinforcement learning.

the neuropsychologists who perform batteries of tests on people with exotic head injuries, hoping to tease out the functions of different brain regions.

Not to mention:<br>the Templeton-Institute-funded psychologists who put Buddhist monks in fMRIs and determine which of their brain lobes gets bigger the moment they become enlightened.

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