The recent reform debates in psychological science, prompted by a widespread crisis of confidence, have exposed and destabilized the so-called myth of self-correction, that is, the problem that most ...scientists perceive their disciplines as self-correcting without engaging in actual practices that correct the scientific record. In this paper, building on the idea of self-correction as a myth, I propose another myth common to psychological science: the myth of self-organization. The myth of self-organization is the idea that scientific literature will organize itself into something the community adding to it would recognize as systematic knowledge; while the actual members of those communities do not engage in effective ways of organizing it. I argue for the existence of the myth self-organization by taking a historical look at how the scientific literature was construed by psychologists during the 20th century. In my view, the literature, and behaviors of scientists related to it, becomes a social institution exerting influence over the science it belongs to. I conclude with a critical discussion of self-organization through the debates about preregistration and theory formalization in psychology’s reform movement.
In this article, I critically discuss the philosophy and psychology of science that are put forward by psychologists involved in the reform debates centered on the so-called “replication crisis” of ...the 2010s. Following the historian of psychology Laurence Smith, I describe the psychologists’ conception of the science system and individual psychology of the scientist as an “indigenous epistemology.” By first describing the indigenous epistemology of the reform movement, my aim is to constructively criticize it by making explicit how psychologists psychologize scientific psychology, and pointing to where such psychologizing needs more conceptual work, especially when it uses the work of philosophers of science. In their writing, the reformers tentatively subscribe to various positions on ways of knowing and functioning of the science system which exhibit fundamental inconsistencies. I suggest some ways for improving and deepening the discussion of epistemological positions that are taken in the replication crisis debates.
Početkom 2010-ih godina u psihologiji se ubrzano počela širiti rasprava o problemima s replikacijom već objavljenih istraživanja. Rasprave su se uskoro pretvorile u višeslojnu kritiku kvantitativnih ...metoda i metodologija koje psiholozi koriste, posebice u dijelu inferencijalne statistike. Problemi s replikacijom opisani su kao simptom dublje krize uvriježenih nacrta istraživanja i statističkih postupaka, u kombinaciji s funkcioniranjem znanstvenoga objavljivanja rezultata i znanstvene komunikacije. U ovome ćemo radu ponuditi pregled rasprava o replikacijskoj krizi i reformskome pokretu u psihologiji, prvi put na hrvatskome jeziku.
In the 2010s, psychological science was engulfed in a discussion about the replicability of already published studies. These discussions soon morphed into a multi-layered criticism of quantitative methods and methodologies in psychology, especially when it comes to inferential statistics. The replicability problems were described as a symptom of a deep crisis of commonly applied research designs and statistical analyses, in combination with the dysfunction of scientific publishing and scholarly communication. In this paper, an overview of the replication crisis and reform movement in psychology in Croatia will be provided for the first time.
Svatko tko radi u sustavu znanosti tijekom posljednjih se godina susreo s pojmom otvorene znanosti. Poput neke poštapalice, pozivi za otvaranjem znanosti pojavljuju se u javnim politikama, ...nacionalnim (npr. NWO, bez dat.) i nadnacionalnim (Glavna uprava Istraživanje i inovacija, 2019) zakladama za financiranje istraživačkog rada, uredničkim tekstovima znanstvenih časopisa u gotovo svim znanstvenim disciplinama te suvremenim sociološkim i filozofskim opisima znanosti. Ukratko, duh otvorene znanosti izišao je iz boce i proširio se znanstvenoistraživačkim institucijama i svim drugim administrativnim tijelima vezanima uz njih. O čemu je zapravo riječ kad govorimo o otvorenoj znanosti?
Početkom 2010-ih godina u psihologiji se ubrzano počela širiti rasprava o problemima s replikacijom već objavljenih istraživanja. Rasprave su se uskoro pretvorile u višeslojnu kritiku kvantitativnih ...metoda i metodologija koje psiholozi koriste, posebice u dijelu inferencijalne statistike. Problemi s replikacijom opisani su kao simptom dublje krize uvriježenih nacrta istraživanja i statističkih postupaka, u kombinaciji s funkcioniranjem znanstvenoga objavljivanja rezultata i znanstvene komunikacije. U ovome ćemo radu ponuditi pregled rasprava o replikacijskoj krizi i reformskome pokretu u psihologiji, prvi put na hrvatskome jeziku.
The commentaries by Baldwin (2018), Green (2018), and Porter (2018) on the 2 articles (Burman, 2018; Flis & Van Eck, 2018) in this special section provide a unique perspective on digital humanities ...approaches to history of psychology. Each of the commentators approached the topic through their own lens-Melinda Baldwin as a historian of scientific journals, Christopher Green as a pioneer in digital history of psychology, and Ted Porter as a historian of quantification. In my response, I tried to reply to the 3 comments by critically discussing 4 themes the special section has raised: the relationship between digital history and conventional history, the perspective that takes databases as both sources for historians and objects in history, the relationship between "thick descriptions" and "thin" digital ones, and finally, the role of digital history as a type of a "trading creole" between scientists working in quantified disciplines like scientific psychology and less quantified ones like history. I think the commentators have rightly observed some pitfalls in the uncritical application of digital history. On the other hand, in my response, I argue that the careful use of digital methods, where the user stays in communication with nondigital historians, opens new perspectives for historians of science, historians of psychology, and psychologists themselves. Digital methods are not there to supplant historicist work but to add to it and translate it to new audiences.
This article aims to provide an overview of the historiography of psychology textbooks. In the overview, I identify and describe in detail two strands of writing histories of introductory textbooks ...of psychology and juxtapose them to provide an integrated historiography of textbooks in psychology. One strand is developed by teachers of psychology—first as a general approach for investigating textbooks in a pedagogical setting, and then later upgraded into a full history of psychology textbooks in America. The other strand follows a more familiar perspective of historians of science and historians of psychology who build on various post‐Kuhnian and post‐Foucauldian perspectives on textbooks. I make an argument for integrating these two views for a more comprehensive historiography of textbooks in psychology, recasting textbooks as objects of research and sources that are interesting sui generis for historians of psychology in their investigations.
This study investigated the structure of psychological literature as represented by a corpus of 676,393 articles in the period from 1950 to 1999. The corpus was extracted from 1,269 journals indexed ...by PsycINFO. The data in our analysis consisted of the relevant terms mined from the titles and abstracts of all of the articles in the corpus. Based on the co-occurrences of these terms, we developed a series of chronological visualizations using a bibliometric software tool called VOSviewer. These visualizations produced a stable structure through the 5 decades under analysis, and this structure was analyzed as a data-mined proxy for the disciplinary formation of scientific psychology in the second part of the 20th century. Considering the stable structure uncovered by our term co-occurrence analysis and its visualization, we discuss it in the context of Lee Cronbach's "Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology" (1957) and conventional history of 20th-century psychology's disciplinary formation and history of methods. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive digital humanities perspective on the large-scale structural development of research in English-language psychology from 1950 to 1999.
The COVIDiSTRESS global survey collects data on early human responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic from 173 429 respondents in 48 countries. The open science study was co-designed by an ...international consortium of researchers to investigate how psychological responses differ across countries and cultures, and how this has impacted behaviour, coping and trust in government efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Starting in March 2020, COVIDiSTRESS leveraged the convenience of unpaid online recruitment to generate public data. The objective of the present analysis is to understand relationships between psychological responses in the early months of global coronavirus restrictions and help understand how different government measures succeed or fail in changing public behaviour. There were variations between and within countries. Although Western Europeans registered as more concerned over COVID-19, more stressed, and having slightly more trust in the governments' efforts, there was no clear geographical pattern in compliance with behavioural measures. Detailed plots illustrating between-countries differences are provided. Using both traditional and Bayesian analyses, we found that individuals who worried about getting sick worked harder to protect themselves and others. However, concern about the coronavirus itself did not account for all of the variances in experienced stress during the early months of COVID-19 restrictions. More alarmingly, such stress was associated with less compliance. Further, those most concerned over the coronavirus trusted in government measures primarily where policies were strict. While concern over a disease is a source of mental distress, other factors including strictness of protective measures, social support and personal lockdown conditions must also be taken into consideration to fully appreciate the psychological impact of COVID-19 and to understand why some people fail to follow behavioural guidelines intended to protect themselves and others from infection. The Stage 1 manuscript associated with this submission received in-principle acceptance (IPA) on 18 May 2020. Following IPA, the accepted Stage 1 version of the manuscript was preregistered on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/g2t3b. This preregistration was performed prior to data analysis.
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