Science is not perfect, especially in a field like psychology.
No kidding.
Your argument to prove the efficacy of this is basically “Trust in the decades of Psychological Research”. To which I have to say…
My Psychology teacher from High School warned me that Psychology started as a Freudian Pseudo-science, turned into a Phrenology pseudo-science to help make Japanese people look dumber for WW2 propaganda purposes, and then had a bunch of poorly done experiments in the 1950s-1980s for various political games.
Anyone who has studied anything about psychology and its history as a subject is, and should be, 100% skeptical of everything. Including long-standing (decades or even century long) traditions like… IQ Tests or Freudian Psychosexuality.
It’s just science.
Psychology has a huge incident rate into pseudo-science / fake topics. I’m sure there’s legitimate discoveries in here but I’m also sure that a huge amount of this field is bullshit.
But maybe I’m just a closted mother-lover in my subconcious who is suppressing my feelings of anger towards my father. My Asian skull is smaller than white people skulls so I can’t think quite as well as some of you out there. Let along deal with issues of statistical auto-correlation or other such issues that occur in more modern studies.
Its not the science that’s bad per se, its the politics that always get in the way. Psychology has a huge number of bad actors in it. And when the ultimate discussion point is “Look at these people… AGGRESSIVELY answering these word-game puzzles with more aggressive words. This proves that they’re more aggressive”… I’m rolling my eyes into the back of my head so hard that I’m honestly throwing this entire piece away. Its not science by my standards.
But if its science by your standards, that’s… fine I guess.
I get that we don’t want to return to the 1970s where we get children to push a button to shock animals, and then determine the length-of-time or frequency of this to use as a proxy as “aggression”. And I understand the need and struggle of modern psychologies to try to come up with modern tests that are humane and effective.
But I have severe concerns that this test isn’t testing anything at all, aside from the biases of the tester.
I’d say if you are concerned, then the door is open to start a career in psychology research. But I think you’d struggle to move your emotions and pre-convinced notions out of your own way.
Or perhaps there’s a simpler option here than me switching careers over a disagreement.
The simpler option is for me to ignore this paper.
