Disproving a Social Science Theory

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I was perusing Wikipedia, and reading a rather interesting article.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories

A nice long list of superseded scientific theories in many fields; physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geography, geology, medicine, and even two theories from psychology.

That last one intrigued me. It was the only social science on the list and the only two examples are the closest to biology / natural science.

There seems to be a problem with social science if it has so few superseded theories.

 

[bilby]

I was perusing Wikipedia, and reading a rather interesting article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories

A nice long list of superseded scientific theories in many fields; physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geography, geology, medicine, and even two theories from psychology.

That last one intrigued me. It was the only social science on the list and the only two examples are the closest to biology / natural science.

There seems to be a problem with social science if it has so few superseded theories.

I tend to agree; But it's possible that the social science types are just less diligent in adding their knowledge to Wikipedia - how sure are you that they actually have fewer superseded theories than the other fields listed at that page?

By the way, I fixed your link in the quote above.

Show

You need to have either:

[URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories[/URL]

or

[WIKI]Superseded_scientific_theories[/WIKI]

If you go with:

[WIKI]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories[/WIKI]

It looks for a page called:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories

and that fails. Which is really a bug on the part of vBulletin, and/or a failure to sanitize URLs by the Wikipedia servers, IMO.

 

[fromderinside]

Question: Is psychology study of mind or study of behavior? Does psychology have any overarching theories? if not why just those two examples? Information processing has moved from psychology to communication and entropy is one very limited example that has changed radically during my academic career. What it comes down to is who are we to disagree - song reference.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Oh yeah, I messed up the link.

 Superseded_scientific_theories

Question: Is psychology study of mind or study of behavior? Does psychology have any overarching theories? if not why just those two examples? Information processing has moved from psychology to communication and entropy is one very limited example that has changed radically during my academic career. What it comes down to is who are we to disagree - song reference.

Not just psychology. Other social sciences include sociology, economics, and political science. Those other three are absent from the list entirely.

 

[Trausti]

Oh yeah, I messed up the link.

 Superseded_scientific_theories

Question: Is psychology study of mind or study of behavior? Does psychology have any overarching theories? if not why just those two examples? Information processing has moved from psychology to communication and entropy is one very limited example that has changed radically during my academic career. What it comes down to is who are we to disagree - song reference.

Not just psychology. Other social sciences include sociology, economics, and political science. Those other three are absent from the list entirely.

The social sciences - the "soft" sciences - may be more adverse to correction. Unlike in, say, physics, social science can become almost a belief system or religion. There is a replication crisis occurring in psychology now, and priming, stereotype threat, and implicit bias should probably soon be added to the list of superseded theories.

 

[ronburgundy]

A list of reason's why Psychology has fewer examples on that list:

1. The list is not remotely close to even trying to be comprehensive. There are tons of falsified psychological theories ranging from most of what Freud said to the Blank Slate to theories that assumed that file drawer type storage and retrieval are valid metaphors for how memory works, and radical behaviorism notion that there is nothing inside the head, only the observable stimulus and the observable response (the latter being falsified by mountain of experiments showing that the response to a stimulus is highly unpredictable, depending on who the person is, their past experiences, and their prior exposure to that stimuli. Without things in the head akin to attitudes, beliefs, and memories, the response of every person should always be the same to any specific stimuli.

2. A scientific approach to psychology is very new and several centuries younger than the natural sciences.

3. Many of the superseded "theories" in in the natural sciences did not come from science in the first place, but from religion and ideological/egoistic assumptions. If we count those, then there are countless other superseded theories in psychology such as Dualism, the existence of a "soul" as the place were higher thought comes from, sexual orientation as a choice, mental illness as a weakness of moral character or demon possession, Parenting as the primary determinant of a child's personality, etc..

4. Psychological theories are about things that everyone has lots of relevant evidence for, and lot's of competing motives to advance various ideas. This creates multiple issues. One is that while there are plenty of bad psychological ideas, there are few that really dominate cultural thinking and thus would make a like of prevailing but wrong theories. Two, once rational people decide to apply some actual science to the question, we have so much relevant experience to use that its unlikely we'd be completely wrong about it.

5. Related to #4 is that most psychological theories focus on cause-effect relations in terms of environment-behavior, leaving the underlying physical mechanism unspecified and referred to only in metaphorical terms as a mental concept, like a "belief" which refers to something people clearly have that impacts their actions and how they respond to a given stimulus, but what exactly it is in physical terms is not presumed. We don't need the concept to be fully specified for it to have explanatory utility. So, what usually happens is that instead of theories taking a stand on it only to be shown wrong, they specify the concept only of much as needed to explain the current data, then new data comes along and fills in the blanks or make modifications rather than a wholesale refutation similar to "Nope, the Earth is not hollow."

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

And as for why sociology, economics, and political science don't even make an appearance on the list?

 

[ruby sparks]

And as for why sociology, economics, and political science don't even make an appearance on the list?

My best guess is that it might have something to do with the fact that these (and psychology) involve capricious subject matter, humans. So if you study a rock or a particle or a cell, it's likely to do the same thing reliably over and over. Less room for competing theories maybe.

 

[ronburgundy]

And as for why sociology, economics, and political science don't even make an appearance on the list?

Again, it isn't an exhaustive list and the people that put it together may be largely ignorant of the history of social science. Most of those on the list are very well know publicized examples. Also, much of what I wrote applies to some degree to other social sciences. Plus, of all the social sciences, psychology is (by far) the closest to the natural sciences in its empirical hypothesis testing methodology. The nature of the questions do often limit the use of direct measures of the concepts and ethics often prevent fully randomized designs. However, you will find tons of true experiments in Psychology and the field has done more than any other to advance creative sophiticated techniques to using quasi-experiments and statistical methods to test causal theories with correlational data.

So yeah, other social sciences suffer much more than psychology from not being able to strongly test their theories to begin with, so they have less opportunity to be shown clearly incorrect and definitively rejected. It isn't a matter of integrity but pragmatic constraints. When your theories are about societal level events rather than individual people, it is quite difficult and rarely possible to have anything beyond highly aggregated correlational data confounded with everything else that happens over time. In fact sociology and political science can rarely even measure as single variable with a well designed approach, because (like history) they are so often limited to sources of data in records that are collected for reasons other than testing a given hypothesis.

That doesn't mean there are not some theories in these areas with far more empirical support than the theories that underlie every other social/political ideology, policy, political system, or just personal assumptions of the sort held by every human (which typically have zero empirical support).
.

 

[ronburgundy]

And as for why sociology, economics, and political science don't even make an appearance on the list?

My best guess is that it might have something to do with the fact that these (and psychology) involve capricious subject matter, humans. So if you study a rock or a particle or a cell, it's likely to do the same thing reliably over and over. Less room for competing theories maybe.

That has something to do with it. How the human brain gives rise to conscious experience and how it's response to stimuli is completely dependent on the near infinite interactions between it's genetic biology and exposure to every prior stimuli in in its history from nutrients, to light, to noise, to experiences is as or more complex than anything any natural scientist could ponder, including at the quantum level. This not only poses an obstacle to really understanding the physiology of human thought and behavior (which we are not remotely close to despite overstated confidence in neuroscience), but it also means that the cause-effect relations of human behavior are virtually never either neccessary nor sufficient but rather highly probabilistic and contextually contingent. This makes it hard to distinguish between a study that fails to support a theory because the theory is wrong versus because the study did not create the contingencies under which the relation emerges. Such results show that a theory is limited and doesn't always apply, but we should rationally assume that about any theory of human behavior, so its not very damning evidence needed to list a theory as definitely "supplanted" on a wiki page.

 

[Politesse]

We absolutely have superseded theories in the human sciences. Pretty much the first third of my cultural anthropology class is dedicated to explaining our basic methodologies, almost all of which required the death of a number of bad hypotheses which had been rampant at the start of the field, biological racism key among these. But others too. The "light in the east" model of single-point diffusion of technology, the arrangement of human history into easily discoverable "ages", the idea that there were consistent and predictable distinctions between "advanced" and "primitive" societies, ideas attached to the previous like the inherent danger of anarchy, the idea that warfare is endless in chronological reach and endemic to the human mentality, that there is an ideal model of parenting or an ideal nutritional budget without which psychosis or illness are inevitable, we could go on and on.

I think one major reason why these aren't publicized more is that society is still deeply attached to these thrive disproven notions; even among science lovers. They crop up afresh every generation, in the the form of some jumped up would-be social theorist writing a popular book to justify them in gross defiance of the body of evidence.

 

[fromderinside]

On one hand one can trace physical theory through an evolution and integration of theory resulting in overriding combined theories like E=mc² whiles in social theory we are still at B=f(OE)