Psychology has endured a lot of black eyes in recent years. Numerous papers have used arbitrary interpretations of brain scans, surveys of college students and unreal levels of social priming, implicit association and motivated reasoning. It has become woo central, embracing everything from the idea that voting Republican is an adaptive function to claims that people can predict the future

High-profile scandals like Kanazawa, Hauser and Stapel make lesser-known social science scholars want to stay hidden in the shadows. 

 But every time I have written about the flaws in psychology - and there are many - I have ended on an optimistic note. Young researchers, I said, are going to fix this issue. They got into the field expecting to do 21st century science and instead found mentors who are doing poorly conducted surveys of college students and making spurious correlations like that liberals will have prettier daughters and people with messy offices are more racist. And few in authority want to note that anyone's else's statistical and experimental methods are poor because they are all doing the same thing.

Young people are going to fix it the first chance they get, and they are not going to care who they have to tear down to turn psychology into science, because the Good Old Boys network no longer exists so there is no point in bowing to them.

Earp et al. were unable to replicate social psychology's “Macbeth Effect” in social psychology, which claimed that a threat to people's moral purity leads them to seek, literally, to cleanse themselves. 

No, really. A whole lot of theories in psychology have the last 20 years have seemed like they were invented on a dare.

It's not the only one. Ego replication - the idea that - has also been shown not to be valid. Does anyone care? Only psychologists at Harvard who are worried their grant won't get renewed.

Psychology is not alone in the 'theory as proper name' problem. Professor Brian Greene got so much mind-share for his book on "String Theory" that people think it is actually a theory. Since then, once a week papers on arXiv will claim they have a theory, when often they have a mathematical conjecture and sometimes a hypothesis.

Science has a theoretical basis - like using theory, psychology is called a 'social science' as a proper name, but it is not science because it lacks the fundamental tenets of science, one of which is a theoretical basis. Everyone has heard of evolution, everyone has heard of gravity, but the only psychological theory the public can name is Freud - and that is the one theory psychologists say is not valid.

That psychologists are starting to recognize these flaws, and are fixing them, is a good thing. A failure to replicate, and getting that published, is progress on the road to becoming science.

Read more:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0109019

http://www.plosone.org/article/authors/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.po...
http://t.co/QrPfrthmVQ

Xu X, Demos KE, Leahey TM, Hart CN, Trautvetter J, et al. (2014) Failure to Replicate Depletion of Self-Control. PLoS ONE 9(10): e109950. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0109950