“What’s Wrong With Psychology Anyway?”, David T. Lykken1991 (, ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

[Lykken’s (199133ya) classic criticisms of psychology’s dominant research tradition, from the perspective of the Minnesotan psychometrics school, in association with Paul Meehl: psychology’s replication crisis, the constant fading-away of trendy theories, and inability to predict the real world the measurement problem, null hypothesis statistical-significance testing, and the granularity of research methods.]

I shall argue the following theses:

  1. Psychology isn’t doing very well as a scientific discipline and something seems to be wrong somewhere.

  2. This is due partly to the fact that psychology is simply harder than physics or chemistry, and for a variety of reasons. One interesting reason is that people differ structurally from one another and, to that extent, cannot be understood in terms of the same theory since theories are guesses about structure.

  3. But the problems of psychology are also due in part to a defect in our research tradition; our students are carefully taught to behave in the same obfuscating, self-deluding, pettifogging ways that (some of) their teachers have employed.