Well said. The incentives of the academic industrial complex have gone all topsy turvy. Opportunistic incrementalism to further careers has subsumed meaningful innovation to further science. Thomas More’s words in A Man for All Seasons come to mind: “We must just pray that when [the] head's finished turning [the] face is to the front again.”
Tom, you raise an important point about the direction of academic research. What changes do you think are needed to encourage more meaningful and innovative scientific discoveries?
With respect to: (2) everyone thinks everyone else does this unmotivated work—their own work is deep and theoretically grounded—and so nobody will think I’m talking about them.
Moved from private sector and spent some time working in government - everyone seemed to acknowledge (with wry smiles) ubiquitous levels of inefficiency and incompetence, but none self-identified as the culprits.
The “I’m not the cause” effect would be worthy of a paper or two. Probably already done. Which leads me to this: papers and graduate theses must be produced en masse as part of an established process - just as civilians (and economies) need jobs to survive. The test is not currently: do people’s jobs all contribute in a valued and meaningful way to the project of civilization? If no, quit and find meaningful work. Why should the standard be higher for academic research, given the institutions, incentives, and processes currently in place?
You bring up an interesting point about the perceived inefficiencies in both government and academia. It's true that many people don’t see themselves as part of the problem, leading to a sort of collective blind spot.
The parallel you draw between job necessity in the economy and the production of academic papers is insightful. It raises a good question about the value and impact of our work.
Perhaps the real challenge is finding ways to align institutional incentives with meaningful contributions to society.
It’s Malcolm and you mentioned because of my financial difficulties you might give me a complementary pass to the after hours for a while, and I seem to have fallen off the radar into the nonsubscription category. Just wondering if I’m still signed up to access the behind the pay wall? Just let me know please, I want to get my subs stack going to and I’m working on so much. Thank you, Malcolm.
A great piece. Focusing on answering a question or using a method just because it's never been done before or "seems more scientific" is a super frustrating part of academia and psychology research that still persists. I recently submitted an NIMH training grant application focused on examining real world exploration, mood, and memory in kids and teens and got stellar reviews with lots of excitement re: the implications for interventions to address the onset of anxiety and depression in development, but the program officer killed the grant before the panel meeting even happened because I didn't include any neural measures :)))))
Actually, I don’t think this is a niche subject. People asking pointless questions, where the answers don’t have any real life consequences one way or the other, are annoying parasites - eating away at the limited time we have to tackle real problems.
Often this kind of work also suffers from significantly useless small samples with attrition bias to boot. I think it is why developmental psychology is one of the methodologically challanged fields in psychology aside from social psychology and evolutionary psychology. Beyond that, the freedom of researchers to create contradicting findings by slightly increasing or decreasing the complexity of the tests is also rather concerning. I have had several discussions with some researchers in pedagogy surrounding certain aspects of development. And for most of their findings you can find contradicting findings. And weirdly enough a lot of those findings are surrounding topics of innateness. And no it's not just the social justice leaning researchers that are creating such contradicting findings. It's from all sides of the discussion. And almost all of that research suffers from relatively severe methodological problems that could casts doubts on the findings. And not just the cliché small samples, convenient samples and so on. It goes all the way up to misunderstanding fundamental statistics p-hacking and so on. Just what was happening in neuroscience with fMRI studies like you wrote in the article and all the problems of social psychology following the start of the bemm studies that led to the replication crisis in 2010.
Not at all niche, or at least this is relevant to any academic reading this. The "why does this matter" question needs to be asked a whole lot more often. And the focus on sheer numbers of publications and journal impact is one of the reasons I'm happy with having stepped off the tenure-line rat race and opted for a teaching career.
Thank you for pointing out a disturbing trend I see a lot lately. Expecting children to be miniature adults. This is a very medieval era concept - if one looks at paintings from that era, they portrayed children as short adults. It’s very uncanny.
I agree with these arguments. But I’m biased, because I personally enjoy thinking about real-life relevance and theories. One could say that pitching one niche or badly construed theory against another is also a waste of time... On the flip side, robust studies, however theory-free they may be, can (unknowingly) build upon each other and yield meaningful conclusions.
Sometimes you have to confirm or disconfirm a theory before you’re able to understand its meaning. Your concerns are valid in any particular case but potentially ruinous in the aggregate.
But I must confess that this year I've shifted from being extremely pessimistic about developmental psychology to being slightly optimistic . There's now a lot of incredibly exciting work from labs in UT Austin, Indiana, UT Houston, NYU, Groningen, and others - by Chen Yu, Linda Smith, etc. It seems that the marginalised "process" or "dynamics" or "interactionist" perspective is benefitting from rapid advances in everything from data acquisition technology (e.g. very lightweight head mounted cameras) to machine learning tools. And I think these are attracting people interested in developing a true understanding of phenomena (rather than just publishing data and believing that descriptions are explanations). Change is coming! (Maybe.)
“This paper fills a much-needed gap in the literature”
That’s hilarious! The best way to stop all this useless “science” - whole departments should go (anyone care to guess which ones?) - is to remove taxpayer's money from the funding. I’ll never stop resenting that the money I earn supports these people and their bs.
Well said. The incentives of the academic industrial complex have gone all topsy turvy. Opportunistic incrementalism to further careers has subsumed meaningful innovation to further science. Thomas More’s words in A Man for All Seasons come to mind: “We must just pray that when [the] head's finished turning [the] face is to the front again.”
Tom, you raise an important point about the direction of academic research. What changes do you think are needed to encourage more meaningful and innovative scientific discoveries?
With respect to: (2) everyone thinks everyone else does this unmotivated work—their own work is deep and theoretically grounded—and so nobody will think I’m talking about them.
Moved from private sector and spent some time working in government - everyone seemed to acknowledge (with wry smiles) ubiquitous levels of inefficiency and incompetence, but none self-identified as the culprits.
The “I’m not the cause” effect would be worthy of a paper or two. Probably already done. Which leads me to this: papers and graduate theses must be produced en masse as part of an established process - just as civilians (and economies) need jobs to survive. The test is not currently: do people’s jobs all contribute in a valued and meaningful way to the project of civilization? If no, quit and find meaningful work. Why should the standard be higher for academic research, given the institutions, incentives, and processes currently in place?
You bring up an interesting point about the perceived inefficiencies in both government and academia. It's true that many people don’t see themselves as part of the problem, leading to a sort of collective blind spot.
The parallel you draw between job necessity in the economy and the production of academic papers is insightful. It raises a good question about the value and impact of our work.
Perhaps the real challenge is finding ways to align institutional incentives with meaningful contributions to society.
It’s Malcolm and you mentioned because of my financial difficulties you might give me a complementary pass to the after hours for a while, and I seem to have fallen off the radar into the nonsubscription category. Just wondering if I’m still signed up to access the behind the pay wall? Just let me know please, I want to get my subs stack going to and I’m working on so much. Thank you, Malcolm.
sorry for the delay, Malcolm. yes, I just gave you a free paid subscription. Good luck with your work.
A great piece. Focusing on answering a question or using a method just because it's never been done before or "seems more scientific" is a super frustrating part of academia and psychology research that still persists. I recently submitted an NIMH training grant application focused on examining real world exploration, mood, and memory in kids and teens and got stellar reviews with lots of excitement re: the implications for interventions to address the onset of anxiety and depression in development, but the program officer killed the grant before the panel meeting even happened because I didn't include any neural measures :)))))
Actually, I don’t think this is a niche subject. People asking pointless questions, where the answers don’t have any real life consequences one way or the other, are annoying parasites - eating away at the limited time we have to tackle real problems.
I wish I wasn’t going into work right now! Coming back to this and wondering what you think of Daniel Siegel and Interpersonal neurobiology.
Often this kind of work also suffers from significantly useless small samples with attrition bias to boot. I think it is why developmental psychology is one of the methodologically challanged fields in psychology aside from social psychology and evolutionary psychology. Beyond that, the freedom of researchers to create contradicting findings by slightly increasing or decreasing the complexity of the tests is also rather concerning. I have had several discussions with some researchers in pedagogy surrounding certain aspects of development. And for most of their findings you can find contradicting findings. And weirdly enough a lot of those findings are surrounding topics of innateness. And no it's not just the social justice leaning researchers that are creating such contradicting findings. It's from all sides of the discussion. And almost all of that research suffers from relatively severe methodological problems that could casts doubts on the findings. And not just the cliché small samples, convenient samples and so on. It goes all the way up to misunderstanding fundamental statistics p-hacking and so on. Just what was happening in neuroscience with fMRI studies like you wrote in the article and all the problems of social psychology following the start of the bemm studies that led to the replication crisis in 2010.
On behalf of all much-needed gaps, thank you for this much-needed post!
Not limited to developmental psychology--finance and economics too.
Not at all niche, or at least this is relevant to any academic reading this. The "why does this matter" question needs to be asked a whole lot more often. And the focus on sheer numbers of publications and journal impact is one of the reasons I'm happy with having stepped off the tenure-line rat race and opted for a teaching career.
Thank you for pointing out a disturbing trend I see a lot lately. Expecting children to be miniature adults. This is a very medieval era concept - if one looks at paintings from that era, they portrayed children as short adults. It’s very uncanny.
This article resonates a lot. Hope you write more on "debunking psychology".
I came to a similar conclusion about social psychology/empirical science in general.
https://chinmaybhat99.substack.com/p/weird-psychology-a-fractured-framework
I agree with these arguments. But I’m biased, because I personally enjoy thinking about real-life relevance and theories. One could say that pitching one niche or badly construed theory against another is also a waste of time... On the flip side, robust studies, however theory-free they may be, can (unknowingly) build upon each other and yield meaningful conclusions.
Sometimes you have to confirm or disconfirm a theory before you’re able to understand its meaning. Your concerns are valid in any particular case but potentially ruinous in the aggregate.
Spot on! And brilliantly funny!
But I must confess that this year I've shifted from being extremely pessimistic about developmental psychology to being slightly optimistic . There's now a lot of incredibly exciting work from labs in UT Austin, Indiana, UT Houston, NYU, Groningen, and others - by Chen Yu, Linda Smith, etc. It seems that the marginalised "process" or "dynamics" or "interactionist" perspective is benefitting from rapid advances in everything from data acquisition technology (e.g. very lightweight head mounted cameras) to machine learning tools. And I think these are attracting people interested in developing a true understanding of phenomena (rather than just publishing data and believing that descriptions are explanations). Change is coming! (Maybe.)
“This paper fills a much-needed gap in the literature”
That’s hilarious! The best way to stop all this useless “science” - whole departments should go (anyone care to guess which ones?) - is to remove taxpayer's money from the funding. I’ll never stop resenting that the money I earn supports these people and their bs.