Why read The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology?

Book cover of The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice

Book description

Why psychology is in peril as a scientific discipline-and how to save it

Psychological science has made extraordinary discoveries about the human mind, but can we trust everything its practitioners are telling us? In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that a lot of research in psychology is based…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Rick Szostak

Author

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers…

From Rick's list on reforming the social sciences and humanities.