What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

9 Replies to “What Would We Do Without Peer Review?”

1. “Scepticism is a core part of science and we need to embrace it. If the evidence is tentative, you should be sceptical of your evidence. We should be our own worst critics,”
   Every scientist should be required to repeat that every morning,like we used to recite the Lord’s Prayer in grade school before classes commenced.

2. True fact: in college a classmate and I completely faked a sociology project (a study of who opens doors for whom on campus) as we were 19 and way too bored to sit in the student center and monitor such things for hours. Got an A on said fabricated project and had the professor call me over the summer wanting to know if he could submit it for some Sociology contest. I learned very early on that fields like sociology and psychology were all a bunch of unverifiable BS.

3. Not a surprise. People who really know what they are talking about are well aware that sociology and psychology and not sciences at all. The universities simply attach the word “sciences” to them in order to give the degrees some gravitas.

4. what were your faked results , that women open doors more often than men ?
   you could send it to the CBC , they had a thing saying women initial sex more than men .

5. sorry hit the send button to fast ,
   if initiating meant faking it , then women would be in the lead
   I always found faking it impossible on my side of the engagement .
   didn’t want to . didn’t have too , couldn’t figure how one could.

6. I think some comments here are flippant. As a research and industrial psychologist, I agree that the publication games have reduced the validity of published results over 40 years. That said, I can never agree that psychology is not a science. I also would never have been bored at 19 and tempted to cheat, as we were taught and ethically used scientific principles and reported null results. Over time, of course, only politically correct grants were given and only results that agreed with the current topics of the day were published. I have always had a healthy scepticism of sociology, but some very good information has come out of both disciplines.

7. Much of this leading edge Psychological theorizing is total BS – primarily because psychology is an imprecise science which produces subjective results – unlike behavioural studies which use repetitive experimental results to confirm a premise, psychological studies vary with the subject tested, making trends hard to decipher and theories almost impossible to prove or disprove.
   Because of this imprecision of psychological assessment, it is an abomination that the courts function on what a shrink will say in testimony – as the Russian soviets discovered, using psychological mumbo jumbo to lock people with the wrong politics away is a real neat trick in any tyrant states tool box.

8. I really don’t care if you can’t agree that psychology is not a science because it simply isn’t. Psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability.
   “Good information” has come out of many things, but they don’t pretend to be science.

9. Behavioural psychology meets all those requirements, Joey, and some might say clinical psych does too. They aren’t the entire field of psychology but they clearly give it a scientific base, don’t they? It’s pretty much up to the psychologist to build on that base responsibly, and no doubt many don’t, but that’s not the fault of the field they’re in.