I don’t have a good outlook on psychology as a field. It’s all influenced by people for leverage and different countries can’t even agree on what qualifies as what (e.g. the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another). But I think watching Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career was the last straw for me this week. Misrepresenting psychology has very annoying implications and it gets tiring to see it done over and over.
To use one example, he mentions the former Axis Power officers in WWII saying they were “just following orders”, which led to the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results. Why? They rigged it, some say to support those officers. Here is an instance where history clashes with psychology, because near the end of WWII, German officers started recruiting and enslaving the Jews they were capturing to do the very dirty work they previously inflicted on them. Did these poor souls succumb to the wickedness like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the officers who inspired it would suggest in court? No, they were traumatized and went insane, because this was not in their nature.
Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations. I’m sure many of you have heard a number of them. Maybe you remember the Milgram Experiment or Stockholm Syndrome for example. So let’s play a game. Look back into your life. Think of all the things you’ve experienced and how it all played out. Out of all these experiences, which ones can you talk about that you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would’ve never happened how it did?
Example: There is a rule in the field of psychology called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other. Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner’s Dilemma on us, but we’re both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.
Psychology, in particular, has a replication problem. Admittedly part of the reason is that no modern IRB would approve something like the Stanford experiment. But part of it, too, as you suggest, is down to rigged studies or other shoddy “science.”
It isn’t confined to social sciences. Dr John Mandrola routinely takes medicine to task for letting pharmaceutical companies run poorly-designed trials then cherry pick and spin the results for profit.