No polite ChatGPT edits. Unfiltered raw Schimmack. Love it or hate it.

It was supposed to be the American Psychological Society (APS), but international researchers complained – especially those who want to publish in prestigious American journals – and APS became the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychological Science is now a brand name and many departments have been renamed to be Departments of Psychological Science. However, you do not become a science, just because you call yourself one, you actually have to behave like a science. And that seems to be something that many psychologists do not want to do because it would mean giving data to decide about the truth. Just like William James, many psychologists like their theories more than truth So, they continue to conduct silly statistical rituals (Gigerenzer) that are biased to show either evidence for their beliefs (p < .05) or no evidence against them (p > .05) and justify another biased test.

Every generation there have been a few psychologists who were frustrated by the futility of this and made suggestions to improve things (Meehl, Cohen, Gigerenzer) or just also fake the data (Stapel). You have to give it to Stapel. Why collect data if their only purpose is to add p < .05 to any claim one wants to make?

Since the early 2010s, thanks to Bargh and Bem, more people are calling for change, but progress is slow and stalling. Meanwhile, most published articles continue to report claims with p-values below .05.

A cynical approach to this sad state of affairs would be to say “fuck it”, “burn it all down,” and enjoy life. However, some people just can’t let go. We (Brunner, Bartos, Schimmack) developed a statistical method that helps readers to distinguish between good and bad significant results. Good ones come from studies with high statistical power that are likely to replicate. Bad ones are studies with low power or even false positive results that will not replicate. Of course, there is no hard line, but we can identify subsets of good studies, if they exist.

You would think an aspirational science would welcome a tool that can salvage good results from decades of research with mostly significant results. Which ones are trustworthy? Which ones are like pornception (Bem, 2011)?

But being a science would mean that we have to expose the fact that some results were made up – not like Stapel on his laptop – but by collecting and analyzing data, year after year, painstaking work to get significant results – and many unpublished failures. No, we cannot have this. Therefore, we have to fight the method that can distinguish good and bad research.

To fight this method, we need to get a peer-reviewed article that claims “the method does not work.” To do so, the article does not have to be evaluated by statisticians or present good arguments. All we need is a quotable peer-reivewed article, because peer-reviewed equals truth, which is also why extrasensory perception is true (Bem, 2011, JPSP).

Now reviewers can quote the criticism – and not cite evidence that contradicts these claims – and editors can use the peer-review to reject the article. The key feature of science is to fight motivational biases. If a system just amplifies misinformation and glorifies misinformation that passed peer-review, it is not a science. Maybe APS really means Anti-Psychological Science.

The question is how long this game of self- and other-deception can continue? At what point will public interest in psychology wane because it never produces any useful results that advance society, health, and wellbeing? Science is worth defending against the attacks by Trumpians, but I am not sure psychological science is part of this.