ITT: How do we fix psychology?

Whatever 'fix' desperately needs to increase reproducibility

http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

>>9136916
Why do you post that pervert, no one in the field takes him seriously

>>9136921
As I said, it tried way too hard to be like chemistry.

This type of experiment is impossible or very difficult to do in a science such as psychology, especially as it is now.

>>9136916
Think of the brain mechanically.
The understanding is ratified when you understand computing.

>>9136916
all of your suggestions is already being done.

the big 5 is quite a reliable construct and can be useful as a point of reference in other areas of research.

desu i dont see how your personality suggestion is different from the big 5.

>>9136921
reproducibility problems are evident across broad swathes of science including biomedical science. it really depends what you're studying and desu i think in the long run, it doesnt matter as much as some people think.

>>9136927
what do you suppose is the alternative. id like to point out also that there are some very good experiments in psychology which have created definitive results and supported important ideas. correlational studies are a very messy part of psychology and they arent even experiments.

>>9136916
Neuroscience.

Once we start gettign better at understanding our brain pychology will look like alchemy.

>>9136921
Reproducibility is irrelevant, the goal is not to derive or develop laws. That's not the right mindset, and it won't ever get results.

The ideal is an abstract model that offers certain branches to explain differences in the same thing done multiple times. ie, you're not "sampling", there is no use in measuring a specific point in time and thinking you can say "that's what it is, and that's why it is". It's all about a model that has predictive power and over a number of iterations, and with a large amount of data, can very quickly narrow down what's happening, and what will happen next. The why is another matter.

And by the way, this has already been done. It's what the world runs on. There are entities out there that know what you think and what you'll do, sometimes before you do.

>>9136974
>I dont keep up with neuroscience

File: r9k types.jpg (962KB, 2400x1720px) Image search: [Google]

962KB, 2400x1720px

>>9136972
>all of your suggestions is already being done.
I know mang, but they are still not quite developing as well as I hoped.

>the big 5 is quite a reliable construct and can be useful as a point of reference in other areas of research.
I don't think so. It doesn't really know what it is talking about, which makes it not only useless, but also detrimental to anyone who takes it seriously.

>desu i dont see how your personality suggestion is different from the big 5.
Main difference is that I won't try to define arbitrary "dimensions of personality" as much as I'd make something like a collection of definite personality types. And I mean, with the origin and development of those personality types. It's comparable to the Jungian archetypes theory, only done scientifically this time. Something akin to pic related probably.

>what do you suppose is the alternative
For personality, I'd prefer an intricate study of an individual's personality and how it developed instead of simply making superficial sociological tests to measure superficial personality differences.

>>9136974
Neuroscience might give some definite insight on the working of psychological concepts, but things such as personality development and psychosocial mechanisms are ultimately on the realm of psychology instead of neuroscience.

They'd complement each other rather than replacing each other.

>>9136974
>>9136974
not true. not true at all.

neuroscience and psychology are interdependent. neuroscience is only valid if it can explain psychological phenomena and we need to have theories of that phenomena to be able to have something to explain. they co-evolve to some degree.

Also, understanding the brain on its own wont necessarily help to understand the how of specific psychological phenomena which are dependent on complex environmental development. The brains output is negligble without the environment that surrounds it.

Also, i don't see how understanding the brain more will make psychology more predictable or less complex. We can understand underlying reasons for psychological phenomena but understanding the brain wont suddenly make personality studies more reproducible. their problem is complexity, not necessarily lack of knowledge. understanding the brain still poses the same problem of confounding or unaccounted variables. Modelling from the point of view of the brain might just introduces more degrees of freedom.

I always thought it would be interesting to do an experiment, taking two people from birth, and placing them in separate identical rooms, no color, minimal bland food, and seeing how their individual personalities develop. Would they grow up with similar personalities? Kind of taps into the question of how much of our personalities are nature vs nurture.
Then, in subsequent experiments, with new subjects, start to control variables of the living conditions. The changes would be seemingly meaningless, for example changing the color of the room or the type of food the subject is given. This would investigate the ways in which the seemingly arbitrary parts of life actually effect the development of youth.

>>9137060
>that autistic writing
Please write properly. Quality of posts is extremely important to this community.

>>9137063
For one, humans don't work that way. They'd need a social environment for them to develop their personality properly and that is very difficult to replicate if we tried.

Second, we already have identical twins as living experiments for this sort of thing.

>>9137022
>I know mang, but they are still not quite developing as well as I hoped.

I think one issue is that its hard to do both at the same time. trying to do both at the same time (psychology + neuroscience) produces a more complicated problem than looking at either of them on its own. And don't forget, neuroscience also has its own problems just like psychology.

>It doesn't really know what it is talking about
How do you mean? it is a well defined construct and has proved useful in other areas of neuroscience or psychology. It doesnt have to be the only model of personality, but it has relevance.

I think your jungian idea is just as bad. your collections of definite types is pretty much the same as defining arbitrary dimensions. in truth its always going to be arbitrary. youll never get non-arbitrary divisions. its similar to the race problem. people have arbitrary labels of race which aren't scientific. but then again, genetically, humanity varies in a continuous fashion across the globe. No one has the exact same DNA. its the same with mental illness. there will be no non-arbitrary dimensions.

Dont you think also, that as is the nature of this continuity, your collections of personality types can be reduced even more into separate dimensions along which everyone varies. the big 5 is separated into smaller dimensions as well infact.

>an intricate study of an individual's personality
this is far too difficulty to do systematically. and in the end, youll just be extracting traits which are just as criticiseable as the big 5. the big 5 atleast has predictive value. Also, dont think the big 5 just came out of nowhere. it was built up over decades of research and was derived statistically using factor analysis which as a method, naturally reduces and abstracts things to predicting factors.

>>9137099
teach me how to write then

>>9136916
Completely amputate it from the humanities. Throw psychoanalysis to the wind. Throw cultural psychology to the wind. Throw counseling psychology into the wind.
If you ever wish legitimatize psychology, as something than poorly applied philosophy, you need to sanitize it of every retarded phantasmic sub-discipline.
Biopsychology, and Evolutionary psychology are the only fields worth study.

>>9136916
>I'd say a biological aproach like those in evolutionary psychology or ethology would be interesting in tracing the development of the instincts, as well as their evolutionary functions. It would also add a lot more objectivity for psychology by having it linked with biology, which can be extended to neurology and sociology, which are highly complementary to psychology.

That is a very tall order.

>>9137099
>They'd need a social environment for them to develop their personality properly

Do you have any decent papers on this? I immediately thought of Genie from the 70's.

>>9136916
The answer involves the following:

Abandon the notions of hypothetical constructs and other mentalsitic explanations to behavior: so no invoking "the mind" to explain behavior, no using constructs like "the memory model" either. This allows psychology to focus on observable behavior as opposed to unobservable notions, circumventing the problem of psychology not being falsifiable.

Doing this lets us to greatly minimize the use of inferential statistics, which causes a vast number of problems when trying to perform experiments such as allowing people to keep adding to their sample until they get results that are "significant." In contrast to this, an inductive method should be implemented that relies on how an organism performs rather than what statistics say as we would have clear data that is based on behavior rather than on hypothetical constructs. Doing this also better allows us to extend psychology to animals.

Physiological aspects of psychology can say, so long as they are not like evolutionary psychology which attempts to assert that behavior is derived from evolutionary past as opposed to current environmental factors (this isn't saying that genetics don't play a role, rather that the environment plays a much larger role; sure genes might influence behavior, but the behavioral changes related to those genes will not occur unless the organism is exposed to the right environmental factors). Physiological aspects of psychology are fine as long as they explain how behavioral phenomena works rather than why it occurs (such as how organisms evolved to become susceptible to operant conditioning.)

tl;dr: Just extend behavior analysis to the rest of psychology.

>>9137137
See Hollow's experiments on rhesus monkey's behavior when they're raised isolated from their peers. Search about feral human children too, if you're not convinced.

>>9137103
>I think one issue is that its hard to do both at the same time
Not really. They complement really, really well. There are many interesting experiments we probably haven't tried yet. For example, a evolutionary comparison between different animal brains and their respective behavior might've been quite fruitful, though nobody did it yet.

>your collections of definite types is pretty much the same as defining arbitrary dimensions.
Not really. The personality types are identified in the personalities of other people rather than being created or assumed arbitrarily.

The dimensions of the Big Five, on the other hand, don't have any real basis for their existence, which makes it a completely arbitrary system with no other purpose besides fitting people in baseless categories. My main complaint is that it concludes that Neuroticism (which is basically unhappiness) is a permanent trait on a given individual, which is obviously not true since everybody has oscillations on their Neuroticism. Even Extraversion is changeable on people depending on the situation. It's just not right to assume people have definite unchangeable personality traits, since in reality they are highly variable. In the end, it explains nothing about personality.

>>9137103
>Dont you think also, that as is the nature of this continuity, your collections of personality types can be reduced even more into separate dimensions along which everyone varies
Indeed, there are variations of the personality types, much like how there are varied subtypes in the typology of personality disorders. There might be slight variations, but those can still be traced to a main archetype.

>this is far too difficulty to do systematically.
Not really. In my view, all that is needed to understand the development of someone's personality are the events that occured on their lives and their reactions to them. As far as I'm concerned, personality traits are born from an outside stimulus and stay as long as they are needed, eventually turning into a permanent part of the personality later. This should be enough to help identify where those personality types start and where they develop through someone's life.

>>9137187
>though nobody did it yet.
Yes they have.
At the moment, we know so little about the brain, it doesn't really add too much to psychology studies. Studies that really try to go into depth and advance our understanding of the brain are often too complicated to directly apply to psychological stuff.

>the Big Five, on the other hand, don't have any real basis for their existence

They are though. They were derived from statistical analysis of natural language terms that people use to describe eachother and themselves. Its therefore got a basis in empiricism. The same you might use in identifying personalities in people.

The way you talk about changeability, I feel like you're misunderstanding what the big five is. Neurotic people can be happy you know. And introverts can look out going around certain people. People can have variable behaviour and long term personality traits too. Plus, it's well known that the big five changes across a lifetime also.

>Not really.
Yes really, its very difficult and requires alot of time and money to do a qualitative case study on one person about their life. This seriously impedes research. This is especially with longitudinal studies (that observe people across their whole life) and without a study being longitudinal, you can't be certain about the events that affected someone's life.

>>9137138
Indeed, though I'd add that simple psychological models/constructs can still be valid if they are completely supported by observed evidence.

I believe a definite categorization of subjective concepts such as emotions, instincts and desires can be created. And by extension, a definite model of the human mind capable of explaining and even foreseeing human behavior.

>>9137126
I agree, though psychology is still pretty compatible to sociology. Things such as value theory may be very relevant for the study of personality development, for example.

>>9137271
>I believe a definite categorization of subjective concepts such as emotions, instincts and desires can be created. And by extension, a definite model of the human mind capable of explaining and even foreseeing human behavior.
There is no need for any of this and no reason to believe that humans even have a "mind." Such concepts are simply used to explain behavior when there are no other known explanations and because of this, are unnecessary to a scientific field.

We are able to explain human behavior by simply looking at one's environment (and to an extent genetic history, but as I said, this part isn't as important). We don't need a model for the human mind to do this nor do we need to categorize emotions when we can just observe everything that occurs before and after a behavior in order to determine its cause (its more complicated than it sounds).

>>9137022
>The Cerebrotonic

FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. At least all those acid trips gave me something...right?

>>9137266
>Yes they have.
Right. I guess it's just a matter of time then.

>They were derived from statistical analysis of natural language terms that people use to describe eachother and themselves.
Exactly. The basis for the Big Five's factors has shit to do with how personality actually works or how it should be organized at all. As I said, it is more in the realm of sociology than psychology for sure.

Plus, it's well known that the big five changes across a lifetime also.
That's a relief, though it kinda defeats the whole point of the Big Five in my opinion. If people are that changeable, then there's not much point in defining their traits.

>Yes really,
There are cheaper ways to do this. Like reading a biography or simply asking people to explain their lives. It might take a while to create a vast and detailed collection of personality types, but as long as it keeps expanding, it's fine.

>>9137238
>There might be slight variations, but those can still be traced to a main archetype.

you're making the same mistake alot of people did in biology when studying species - you assume there is an archtype and people are variations of it. But really, variation is the norm with a tendency to cluster. It's called population thinking, and you should look it up.

The typology of personality disorders is one thing i disagree with and think is quite arbitrary. Especially with subtypes. You can construct your own subtypes very easily, thats how arbitrary it is.

Human personality varies immensely and continuously; there maybe causes to these variations but there cannot be objectively discrete categories.

>>9137138
>>9137126
>>9137280
Can't disagree more.

You must be trolling.

>>9137300
>he never heard of behavior analysis
>he disagrees with a scientific analysis of behavior
This is why people think psychology isn't a science.

I haven't really studied but as a neurodiverse individual I just have some extreme resentment toward it for some reason. Probably just the application. And the fact that it's another human analyzing you.

I've been psychoanalyzed before and it was a failure. They wanted to determine if I wanted to kill everyone at my school. I got the pass by being totally honest. I told her how much I hated my drunk mom and my stupid teachers and that school goes way too slow and I've been held back for no reason. But that I have a full ride to college and I just made a joke to my friend's mom who's an idiot and yes I am miserable but I'm almost done.

Little did she know I really was starting to go over the edge like two years prior. If it weren't for my own stubbornness to remain completely passive toward everyone I really would've killed everyone and it woulda been hella easy.

Checkmate atheists

>>9137296
>Exactly. The basis for the Big Five's factors has shit to do with how personality actually works or how it should be organized at all. As I said, it is more in the realm of sociology than psychology for sure.

No, the big five doesn't tell you the cause of personality, that's research that is ongoing and done by many groups. But it is valid and reliable statistically. The big five are not drawn from thin air, they were made by interviewing or testing people and doing statistical analysis on their answers. You can argue that the methods of finding out about people aren't ideal, but the analysis is robust.

>There are cheaper ways to do this etc.

I just don't think its worth it unless you're looking for specific groups or specific phenomena. With something as broad as personality traits in general, you'll be generalizing and abstracting over many groups that you'll probably end up with simple concepts that are more obtainable with simpler methods, rather than having to perform massive qualitative analyses which by their nature are also less generalizeable, less reliable.

And btw, the methods you describe are actually far more associated with sociology than psychology.

What's the difference between psychology and sociology then?

>If people are that changeable, then there's not much point in defining their traits.
Says the one complaining that we shouldn't define peoples behaviour as being unchangeing *okay then*.

>>9137280
I agree with your way of thinking. Though you shouldn't expect to be able to tell the response of an individual to a certain occurence without counting in the underlying personality it has built over the course of its life.

The personality is modeled through emotional impressions, which can be categorized indeed. To count in the personality of the animal, it might be necessary to create a "mind" model to construct the personal aspects of the individual (personality) in interaction with his innate aspects, thus forming his "mind".

>>9137306
Tell me what behaviour analysis is then.

Being is too abstracted to ever be fully ground in empirical studies that are insanely accurate, repeatable and useful across a lot of domains

this problem cannot ever be circumvented without cutting yourself short somewhere

>>9137337
A field of science dedicated to analyzing the behavior of humans and other animals. This alone doesn't explain much, so it might be more useful to explain some of its core assumptions.

Behavior analysis assumes that all behavior is caused by something outside of the organism (outside meaning not due to "itself" or other free will based explanations) known as environmental causes. Environmental causes can range from something like "a loud noise" to "not eating for 10 hours." In other words, this is saying that behavior analysts believe in determinism rather than free will.

An example of a notable achievements of behavior analysis would be its discovery and application of operant conditioning (most people should have some idea what this is, if not then positive reinforcement is an example) to many different environments both in experimental and applied settings (behavior analysis is great at treating developmental disabilities, drug addictions, and obesity, among other things).

Behavior analysis also assumes that one does not need mentlistic explanations to explain behavior (no need for concepts such as the mind when you can look into the environment for the cause of behavior), this is generally why behavior analysts clash with other paradigms of psychology (see Chomsky and MacCorquodale for an example of this).

>>9137324
>No, the big five doesn't tell you the cause of personality, that's research that is ongoing and done by many groups. But it is valid and reliable statistically.
It may be stastistically reliable, but that's useless if it doesn't know exactly what it is examining. I really doubt it will be able to truly add a good contribution to psychology.

>I just don't think its worth it unless you're looking for specific groups or specific phenomena.
It's a big deal if you consider you can use it to predict which personality types are created in response to a certain environment or so. This might also help us predict how certain personality types can be avoided or how they can be developed. It might take a while, but a categorization like this would prove very fruitful.

>What's the difference between psychology and sociology then?
Yes, they overlap very much when we start talking about what makes people different from each other.

>Says the one complaining that we shouldn't define peoples behaviour as being unchangeing
Indeed. Though, in my case, I'm taking that part into account.

>>9137328
If you replaced personality with environmental history, you would be correct. Personality is a hypothetical construct meant to explain behavior without actually explaining it, while one's environmental history is based off of observable events in one's past that can influence behavior (EX: if you were shocked after turning on a light switch, you may be more likely to avoid turning on that light or going into that room in the future.)

>>9137371
>that's useless
Its not useless if you can use it to study things like mental illness, if you can do studies about genetic or environmental correlations/causes of them or you can use it in neuroimaging studies. What are your studies going to do that's different to explain what you're examining. You're doing the same thing - correlating behaviours together to extract factors.

>It's a big deal if you consider you can use it to predict which personality types are created in response to a certain environment or so.

That's a different line of research i'd say; where you'd need to know the types apriori. You can do that with the big 5 already.

>>9137379
But there is a non-linear relationship between your environmenal past and your current behavioural tendencies.

>>9137367
So what do you think about attention or working memory or visualising things with your mind or your mental voice?

>>9137426
>attention
A concept used to explain behavior without actually explaining it. In order to explain this behaviorally, you need to break each component of "attention behavior" into behavioral parts, such as: eyes are looking towards the item in question, they are performing correct writing behavior (in a school setting), they are not performing any behaviors that reduces the likelihood they perform the behaviors listed, etc.

>working memory
>implying congitive psychology isnt a meme
This is a problem with psychology that I described here >>9137138. Working Memory doesn't actually do anything to explain behavior without invoking circular reasoning: "How does memory work -> it goes through working memory -> how do we know that -> because they are able to perform X behavior on a given test -> how do we know that proves working memory exists -> because the model says thats what working memory is able to do...."

>thinking related concepts
Behavior analysts generally don't deny that thinking exists, they just describe it as behavior as opposed to the causes of behavior and like other behavior, can be influenced by the environment. The only difference with thinking is that it is much more difficult to observe someone doing it (its considered internal behavior). Granted, there is a debate in behavior analysis as to whether or not we need the assumption of internal behavior, but that isn't important right now.

>there is a non linear relationship....
Explain what you mean by this.

>>9137396
>
You could say that, but I still think the Big 5 is unreliable due to its lack of real psychological explanation and for the fact that its data is naturally way too changeable. The fact that more and more psychological researchers use it kinda upsets me now. Also, let me guess, Neuroticism is the most highly correlated with mental illness, isn't it?

>>9137450
For attention, what about covert attention which can't be observed behaviourally?

For working memory -

Yes i see your point but can't you posit an underlying construct with predictions from this type of behaviour? What would you call that construct? Just another behaviour?

And one thing is that, say you gave someone a task where they had memorise numbers and after a delay say them - you won't posit mental concepts for how they keep that information in their head during the delay?

And if not, what about concepts that are spoken of in terms of brain activity during that delay.

Furthermore, if the person can do this task without the response in the end - that is, without the overt behaviour - surely, the construct cannot be described in terms of behaviour. Yet the construct is still valid because there is still neural activity where the "delay" is, even if there is no response at the end of the delay.


Okay, just said all that and saw your last paragraph but won't delete.

Isn't internal behaviour exactly the same as a mental concept? Doesn't internal behaviour cause external behaviour? (in the sense that the brain causes the body to move).


>non-linear

I mean that people react in different ways to their environmental histories such that you can't always predict someones behavioural tendencies from their histories.

>>9137453

>lack of real psychological explanation

Irrelevant to reliability. And many psychological constructs lack a satisfying explanation.

>data is naturally way too changeable

I don't see how off the top of my head.


And yes, neuroticism is.

Require repeatability before any study is accepted just like with any other science. Don't allow subjective non falsifiable terms or ideas to entire the sphere of psychology either.

>>9136972
>It doesn't matter
Yes it fucking does. Being able to repeat a study is extremely important or else you don't know if it's bullshit or not. Notice how Biomedical has the same problems too?

>>9137522
Covert attention would have the same problems as working memory, we don't really have a reason to assume that it exists as there is no benefit in doing so.

For working memory, we wouldn't call the construct anything, we would say that there is no reason to assume that it exists and that the phenomena it explains can be explained through external environmental factors instead.

Its important to note a distinction between thinking and hypothetical constructs like working memory; to behavior analysts, thinking is really just speaking (or engaging in verbal behavior) internally. There isn't any construct used to explain or bridge concepts regarding internal behavior that don't also apply to external behavior; so someone thinking "1, 2, 3, 4, 5...." would be effectively the same as someone saying it out loud (minus physical differences between the two). We wouldn't say that one goes through a hypothetical process and the other doesn't.

As for your last paragraph, that is where the debate comes in (at least for the first sentence). Some behavior analysts see no reason to assume that thinking as a concept is needed at all because there isn't a discernible difference between it and other mentalistic concepts. In behavior analysts, internal is traditionally described as behavior that can only be observed by the individual performing it, but this concept has the problem when considering external behaviors where only one person can observe it (doing yoga in your room alone for example). The "can only be observed by one person" part creates problems with mentalism.

The second sentence is much simpler to explain, the brain allows for behavior to occur, but it doesn't cause it. An easier way to think about this is that you have an hands that are able to grab things, but you won't actually grab anything unless there is a reason for you to do.

Is there a real reason why psychology shouldn't just be evolutionary psychology? What is the point of other subfields when a biological approach is the only really scientific one?

>>9137522
>I mean that people react in different ways to their environmental histories such that you can't always predict someones behavioural tendencies from their histories.

For all intensive purposes you can (assuming you have reasonable knowledge on their history). While environmental histories differ, the laws of behavior stay the same, even with patients with serve disabilities, positive reinforcement can be used to increase desired behavior (Fuller, 1949 shows this). The difficult part with reinforcement comes with finding something that can serve as a sufficient reinforcer (anything that increases the likelihood of behavior).

>>9137562
If anything, evolutionary psych is the least scientific area of psychology. Most of it is just unfalsifiable speculation.

>>9137562
Evolutionary Psychology invokes many of the same problems as other fields of psychology and should not be confused with physiological psychology. Behavior analysis does a much better job explaining how people behave and does so in a scientific way, a way that does not rely on deduction from non-observable constructs or inferential statistics.

>>9137557
>to behavior analysts, thinking is really just speaking (or engaging in verbal behavior) internally
This seems like a bold assertion. Is there much evidence to support it?

>>9137379
>environmental history
Looks interesting, though I searched about it and nothing came up at first. Are you making this concept up? Besides, it's tradition to just refer to it as personality.

>>9137528
I bet any results that the stastistics may show will be either obvious, unproductive or superfluous for psychological explanation.

Also, forget the thing about changeability. It doesn't really matter at all now that I think about it.

>>9137543
Evidence in natural cases is a better way of proving psychological phenomena desu. But yeah, as long as nothing akin to that
hidden unconcious/subconcious bullshit is implemented again.

>>9137574
Behavior analysts conclude this based off of the lack of evidence to support the existence of any other more complex theory of thinking. From this perspective, there really isn't a reason to assume that thinking is more complicated. To answer your question, there really isn't evidence of this, but that is only because there is no evidence of any other internal explanation for thinking either and at that point, behavior analysts are just using Occam's razor.

That said, this idea is in part the basis of cognitive behavioral therapies which is just applying behavioral concepts to thinking/emotions as well as to external behavior.

>>9137546
>
>>9137546
I didn't say it doesn't matter. I just think that in the long run and over a vast many studies, it is a smaller barrier than people think to scientific progress. When people think about replication alot, to me, they are thinking too much about experimentation and not enough about the construction of theories which is a real driver of science also. I think replicability doesn't matter so much because theories will draw evidence from many many different types of studies and I think this minimises problems of replicability in some sense. If replicability was that important, we wouldn't have gotten so far with psychology or neuroscience.

I also query as to what it means when they say psychology studies aren't replicable and why. I'd need to read into the study.

>>9137589
Look up the term "ontogenetic history" instead, I am simplifying things so it is easier to understand.

>>9137546
It's very difficult to control the psychological environment of a organism. The closest we can get to replication is having the phenomenon occur naturally once again and have it noticed.

>>9137590
>behavior analysts are just using Occam's razor.
They're not, though. They're replacing one assumption with another.
One experiment I find interesting is that people who only speak a language that doesn't have words to differentiate between particular colours can still differentiate between those colours when tested (I forget the exact methodology; something to do with comparing threads of different, but similar, colours). This seems hard to reconcile with the assertion that people only think verbally.

>>9137591
If it's not replicable, it's not science.
That doesn't mean scientific study is the only valid method of study. But it does mean we have to stop pretending psychology is science if it continues to struggle to replicate important studies.

>>9137595
Then stop calling psychology science. You can't have it both ways. We can't pretend psychology is valid science while also insisting replicability is too hard.

>>9137615
Assuming this person could still see, they could simply be discriminating against different shades of the same color without needing to label them. Animals are able to behave different when different color stimuli are presented (assuming they have been paired with a reinforcer) and generalization (behaving in the same way to differing stimuli) can occur across different colored stimuli, with colors similar to the original stimuli producing stronger effects on behavior than those more different.

I should really emphasize that behavior analysts do not believe that thinking causes behavior (or any internal construct for that matter). They believe that thinking is a behavior itself that is controlled by the same factors as other forms of behavior.

>>9137630
I guess I'm just uncomfortable with the bold assertion that all thinking is verbal. But many fields have little quirks like that which tend to get ironed out eventually. I don't expect behaviour analysts to believe such an assertion in, say, 50 years time for instance.

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>>9137622
By your shitpost, you're also implying Biology and Ecology aren't sciences since they derive evidence from observation most of the time instead of replication.

Pathetic.

>>9137644
Biology/ecology are generally split between actual predictive, replicable science and stamp-collecting. If you're trying to lump psychology in with stamp-collecting, that's fine.
Can you imagine a biologist proposing a model for cellular replication that mysteriously only works in his/her lab and then claiming that people are focusing too much on replicability? They would be laughed out of academia. Apparently, though, that's a perfectly acceptable practice in psychology.

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>Does it use the scientific method?
>Yes, it's a science.

Problem with psychology is that there are too many normies and stacies, not cut out for thinking scientifically and applying scientific thought to the field.

To fix psychology, psych majors should be required to take General Chemistry & General Biology courses, Organic Chemistry, and General Biochemistry. This will weed out all the fat and improve the field greatly.

If someone wants to be a social worker (Most people call these professionals psychologists), the program should be Sociology.

>>9137557
Theres always a benefit to constructs if they have predictions.
Tbh, I don't see how you can explain working memory or attention through external factors, though they do have empirical demonstrable evidence.

One thing is neural activity. You haven't addressed this.

Well, I still don't agree with behaviour analysis at all and it seems like an ultra-outdated idea to me.
I view the brain as a model of the world; a simulation, so we have internal representation you can call mental in this idea. And if you think about it, the only way we can view our own behaviour is through the mental in a sollipsistic sense. Wouldn't you agree? Even if you didn't call that a scientific statement in a behavioural sense ;)

>>9137640
Verbal behavior isn't simply anything that is verbal, its a term that describes any behavior the is controlled by the behavior of other people (speaking is a common example, but it is far from the only form of verbal behavior).

>>9137621
theres not even a real definition of science and no discrete demarcation of what is science and not which isn't subjective. its a social institution with variable methods. areas of biology are less scientific than psychology. its just immature to argue about science in this way and it has no real benefit. you're naive also just to use binary replicable/non-replicable

>>9137566
>>9137566
I disagree. Theres so much evidence that environmental events impact people differently and unpredictably, notably seen in theories of motor development using dynamical systems theory. I'm taking this from a paper, where the author says you regularly see those at high risk that respond well therapies and those at low risk with very bad outcomes and its all to do with great complex interactions between the environment and the individual.

Statistically we can identify effects across populations, but when faced with an individual its incredibly difficult to predict their outcomes.

>>9137679
>theres not even a real definition of science
yes there is, please stop spewing such nonsense

Psychology is good as is. It isn't perfect, but keep in mind that it's a new science. It has had nowhere near as much time to develop as have the physical sciences.

Sociology on the other hand, no clue what the fuck happened to that discipline

>>9137679
So, let me get this straight. Your argument is that psychology is scientific if you choose to use a very loose definition of science?

>>9137661
>>9137690

What do sociologists even do?

>Yeah, there are people and these people from here feel this way about this thing. Statistics show that this many people in a sample size of 500 feel this way.

>>9137589
>I bet any results that the stastistics may show will be either obvious, unproductive or superfluous for psychological explanation.

explain yourself if you wish to. i dont see a reason for you to say that except that you like your own ideas better.

>>9137658
Then you didn't get what I mean. Psychology, much like ecology and sociology, must derive evidence from observations in the natural environment. For example, we can check the psychological implications of child abuse when it happens ocasionally.

Besides, psychology is a special case of science since everyone is actively experiencing what it does all the time. Everyone can verify the existence of Cognitive Dissonance, for example, by memory alone.

>>9137615
>>9137630

I wouldn't take him too seriously; hes using ideas that are about 80 years old and hit a brick wall back then.

>>9137699
If it's not replicable, just don't call it science. It's that simple.
I'm not saying psychology isn't a worthwhile area of study. It just annoys me that psychology tries to leech off of the prestige of actual science by pretending to be actual science. You might think this is harmless, but it actively harms public perception of real sciences by association, which can have real-world negative effects.

>>9137665
Behavior analysts wouldn't try to explain either of those concepts, simply because behavior analysts do not believe they actually exist. Behavior analysts are generally against the deductive form of reasoning used by cognitive psychologists to draw their conclusions regarding concepts like working memory and instead favor a more inductive approach where one gathers data first and then draws their conclusions about a phenomena (rather than making a theory and then using data to support/debunk it).

Neural activity explains how behavior occurs, but it does not explain why it occurs. As I said earlier, someone can have hands and having hands allows for people to grab items. But that person will not grab any items unless there is an environmental reason to do so (EX: they have not eaten in 12 hours and there is food in front of them, so they may grab that food). Just having hands doesn't automatically mean the person will grab.

>>9137684
Because people have been exposed to different environmental factors throughout their lives and those factors affect how they will behave in a given situation (this is also why behavior analysts often deal with smaller sample sizes than other fields of psychology). Behavior analysts actually do quite well in predicting the behavior of individuals by looking into that individuals (or animals) environment by trying to determine antecedent events for behavior and the consequences of said behavior and altering those to produce desirable changes in behavior.

The better question regarding that authors conclusion is whether or not the individual (in the sense of having a "self") is necessary component to explaining behavior beyond what has happened to that person in their past.

>>9137689
what is it then? have you read any philosophy or history of science?

>>9137693
no, im not saying anything, you're just walking into a brick wall talking about an issue which really doesnt matter. its more important to talk about making psychology more replicable (which i think you cant at the moment because of its complexity) than talking about shit like whether its a science or not which has no effect on anything except your ego.

>>9137698
Honestly, it's just what most of my experiences with it felt like, but I can't say that for sure. I'll take it that it is not useless, if only a bit lacking on its foundations.

Also, yes, I do consider my ideia more applicable in the field.

>>9137720
If it doesn't matter whether we call psychology a science, why are you so adamantly defending its status as science?

>>9137716
how does it leech off the prestige of actual science? and so many other areas of science have replicability issues, even chemistry. No area of science is completely replicable and i dont think replicability should be the best mark of science when this virtue is given to it on the complexity of the subject matter and not the method that is used. is cognitive neuroscience a science?
People know shit about science in general anyway and i guarantee, most people dont think of psychology as a science anyway so youre safe.

>>9137720
>what is it then?
science is the study of phenomena using the scientific method, what else would it be?

> have you read any philosophy or history of science?
plenty

>>9137716
You know you can replicate most psychological concepts with your own thoughts and feelings, right?

Also, you missed the point of the thread. We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.

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>>9137706
>>9137706
Behavior analysis is still alive and well and is used to great effect to help the developmentally disabled, drug addictions, obesity, animal training, and a variety of different social problems. Do not confuse modern behavior analysts (known as radical behavior analysts) with methodological behavior analysts; methodological behavior analysts assumed that internal concepts such as thinking, a sense of self, ego, etc. existed but could not be studied scientifically. They took a dualistic approach regarding mentalistic concepts, asserting that the concepts were seperate from each other, where modern behavior analysts believe that both internal/external behaviors are affected by the same laws of behavior.

>>9137621
Fortunately, behavior analysts are able to replicate their results quite well. Pic related is an ABAB design, where the behavior analysts records the baseline rate of behavior then implements the treatment, then removes the treatment to determine whether the treatment was causing an effect on the behavior. Note, that this is an extremely idealized graphed and the data usually isn't this perfect.

>>9137739
>You know you can replicate most psychological concepts with your own thoughts and feelings, right?
>We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.
Why are you talking about fixing psychology as a serious science while advocating for self-reporting as a means for reproducibility?

>>9137744
Not just that, he is advocating going back to introspection. A garbage form of psychology utilized in the 1800s.

>>9137732
The failures of psychology as a pseudo-science are becoming more widely known. This harms the overall reputation of science, which can have serious effects on public perception, which can cascade into public policy and public funding of sciences. Psychology masquerading as real science is not harmless.
>and so many other areas of science have replicability issues, even chemistry. No area of science is completely replicable
You're deflecting. Replicability issues are much more pronounced in psychology than any other field that calls itself scientific. This calls all (yes, all) conclusions drawn from psychology into question.
>People know shit about science in general anyway
Oh, you're right. We shouldn't hold psychology accountable for its replicability issues because the general public are stupid. Why didn't I think of that?

>>9137744
>>9137751
I was actually just joking since it really seemed like you were merely shitposting.

>inb4 merely pretending

>>9137739
>We were supposed to be thinking on how to fix psychology as a serious science.
My whole fucking point is that it is not a serious science (at least not as practised currently). So the most significant improvement we could make would be to either drop the pretense of psychology as a science entirely, or put our big boy pants on and do some actual science.

>>9137718
It confuses me that you can believe attention doesn't exist even though you can experience it personally. Do you actually believe what a cognitivist would call attention doesn't actually exist inside your head? or are you just disagreeing with the construct? What if i said, attention was actually a type of behavioural construct (because it does have empirically verifiable data)

And, wouldn't the environmental reason be encoded in the brain? e.g. a long term goal.


> different environmental factors

I mean, people with the same histories reacting differently. What you talk about with reinforcements and animals is different i'd say because that is extremely simple behaviour as opposed to personality.

>>9137729
im not, im criticising you for butting in on a thread which has nothing to do with psychology's status as science.

>>9137769
Yet all your replies have tried to justify psychology's status as a real science.

>>9137742
Show me some studies because I actually don't believe you that they've done this so recently.

ive actually seen these types of graphs before because i work with rats in reinforcement learning.

>>9136916
Any meaningful work in psychology not captured at the level of the organism and its biology is reducible into "data science" somehow broadly defined. Big 5 has meaning in that it is essentially an exercise in unsupervised learning that has proven very replicable. Specifically, it is useful as a model of personality that explains the maximal amount of response variability in the sparsest number of latent variables (i.e., "personality dimensions").

Anything else in psych is either scientifically intractable/poorly defined or pseudoscientific. Psychology is often a steaming pile of shit, but it would be less so if people stopped trying to peddle poetry and creative writing as science. Jung and Freud were brilliantly creative and inventive man, but they were not scientists. Attempting to reconcile their kind and later psychodynamic/humanistic/existential thinkers with the science of brain, perception, and behavior is and will always be a shit show. By definition, explorations of human consciousness in the subjective sense are not proper objects of scrutiny by the scientific method. Science can categorically say nothing about these things similarly to the fact that a hammer cannot calculate the first 1000 digits of pi. This doesn't discredit the value of science or the hammer, but empasizes the value of knowing their proper use.

Answers that are verbally satisfying, but logically lax, are the source of a lot of grief in psychology. It is a perfect case study in why both superior verbal and quantitative reasoning are necessary for the healthy conduct of research. Otherwise, you just end up hurling words around without saying much of anything.

>>9137764
I would say that attention is really just a term you use to describe a constellation of behavior as opposed to something that exists as a construct inside your head. This then leads to the question as to what behaviors constitute attention behavior and what don't, but in an applied setting, this isn't a huge issue as long as the person starts engaging in those behaviors more often.

There is no reason for one to assume that environmental reasons are encoded (at least not as a useful way of explaining behavior) as opposed to simply just describing which environmental factors lead to which behaviors.

No one has the same environmental history, even slight changes can lead to differences in behavior.

As for your comments on animals, I recommend watching this document show casing Skinner and one of his grad students teaching animals to perform "complex" behaviors such as "self awareness" as a means to debunk those concepts. Alternatively, you can just read this to get a summary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKSvu3mj-14

http://www.robertlanza.com/self-awareness-in-the-pigeon/

>>9137753
my point is that youre talking about this a black and white issue when it isnt.

It really doesn't draw all conclusions in psychology in to question. you're being extremely naive. Theres plenty of robust phenomena in psychology and robust theories.

Ive said before, i actually want to read the papers on this more because im convinced that these back and forth arguments about replicability are far oversimplified.

>>9137774
Here is one from 2007.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885411/

ABAB design is a pretty core design of behavior analysts (there are other designs like multiple baseline design, alternating treatment, etc.), a large number of studies in JABA use them (granted a lot of these aren't free, but if you are working in a lab with rats, you should have access to JEAB.)

>>9137060
A lot of neuroscience occurs without reference to behavior or higher cognitive faculties. There is a lot to be discovered about how the brain itself works and changes in its function over time. Any inferred relationship to more abstract processes are incidental benefits.

>>9137772
quote back to me

>>9137801
Read your own posts. I'm not stooping to your level.

>>9137792
>No one has the same environmental history, even slight changes can lead to differences in behavior.

very true, and the non-linearity comes in how precisely we are willing to define our environmental history. Most of the time in psychology or science, we classify things on very broad factors which leaves huge room for differences of effect. The only other cause for non-linearity i'd say is that we are obviously all genetically different.

>>9137792
>http://www.robertlanza.com/self-awareness-in-the-pigeon/

this one video doesn't strictly entail radical behaviourism. and anyway it was like 60 years ago.

>>9137742
Its funny. Animal learning people agonized over developing these learning paradigms to demonstrate fundamental laws of learning and now their most enduring legacy in academia is that the simples ones (e.g., conditioned place preference, inhibitory avoidance, simple fixed rate operant schedules) get used as dependent variables in optogenetic/DREADD research. I always found that sorta sad. At the same time, they are still used.

>>9137816
because the fundamental laws of learning thing was seriously misguided.

>>9137809
1981 (documentary in 1982), but that doesn't make any of the concepts in said documentary wrong. They are simply reporting on a number of experiments they performed, that link providing the paper on the self-awareness one.

If you want a replication of this, here is an article describing a replication from 1999.

https://psychology.lafayette.edu/mirror-use-in-pigeons/

>>9137802
lool what did i do that was so bad?

>>9137788
>Big 5 has meaning in that it is essentially an exercise in unsupervised learning that has proven very replicable
This is mostly because the dimensions measure traits that often are directly associated with the factor being studied (i.e. Neuroticism and Nervousness, Extraversion and Happiness).
The actual progress enabled by stastistics using the Big 5 is usually pretty small.

As of now, Behavior Analysis is the most scientific aproach I've seen for Psychology recently.

>>9137823
all im saying is that you dont have to be a radical behaviourist to agree with it and i doubt the replicators were either

>>9137798
What are you studying/have a degree in anon? At least here in the states, any pure behavioristic study of animal learning and behavior is more or less seen as outdated and is likely underfunded, in my understanding.

Most experimental guys following in the tradition of people like Tolman/Lashley have gone the route of behavioral neuroscience/neurobiology. Off the top of my head, thinking of guys like Jim McGaugh, John O'Keefe, Michael Fanselow, Richard Morris, and Bruce McNaughton.

>>9137829
I am in a masters program for applied behavior analysis, which is basically just the application of behavior analysis towards socially significant issues. There is a huge demand for it regarding the treatment of the developmentally delayed (especially in my state) and its relevant in treating drug addiction/obesity (granted, contingency management is more controversial because lay people don't like the idea of giving people "rewards" for not taking drugs) but I am more interested in going for a doctorate.

>>9137822
To a certain extent. Attempting to explain behavior in terms of behavior is just as bad as social/personality psychologists attempting to explain verbal conjecture with even more elaborate, overwrought verbalized "theories". There are certainly instances where we can demonstrate that seemingly identical behaviors are supported by entirely dissociable neural substrates.

http://smash.psych.nyu.edu/courses/spring16/learnmem/papers/Packard1996.pdf

>>9137827

>measure traits that often are directly associated with the factor being studied

That's the point... A factor analyses takes a large bunch of traits that describe a person and based on how they covary amongst a sample or population of people, underlying factors can be extracted.

Neuroticism is associated with nervousness because it was extracted as a factor long ago from the statistical association of a bunch of traits such as nervousness etc etc etc.

Neuroticism isnt defined as such arbitrarily, it was defined as such because of its association with factors such as nervousness etc.

>>9137837
>Attempting to explain behavior in terms of behavior
It's a good thing behavior analysts explain behavior based on environmental factors rather than in terms of behavior itself (granted, the rate/duration/latency between/intensity/etc. of the behavior are still relevant, but these are terms used to describe how effective an environmental change is rather than just explaining the behavior with behavior).

>>9137836
I see. From undergrad, I remember hearing that pure ABA stuff had maintained more of a foothold in applied domains versus academia. Its unfortunate, as there are a lot of cool paradigms and contingencies that are entirely ignored in modern academic behavioral neuroscience. Most addiction labs basically get by on FR autoshaping up to FR5 for drug self-admin studies. It's what everyone does and its pretty much left at that.

>>9137836
This course doesn't teach radical behaviouralism i expect though? Is it just with people then?

>>9137848
My program had a course dedicated to the philosophy of behaviorism (and spent quite a bit of time on radical behaviorism). In 2020, BACB is changing the requirements making it so all students are required to learn about radical behaviorism and some of the philosophical papers Skinner wrote.

>>9137844
What is "environment" but a complex milieu of behavioral contingencies generated as a consequence of one's own and others behaviors? Environment is a complex aggregate of behavior, but it is still behavior, specifically behavior imposing contingencies on an organism. I'm not sure that is a satisfactory answer to the question of what is necessary and sufficient to cause a given behavior, let alone any of the more complex, high level cognitive stuff.

My point is that biology matters and the brain matters. The brains computations over perceived stimuli and its ability to encode information matters. Does "environment" matter? Probably, but given the multifactorial, likely nonlinear nature of it ecologically, it may not be the best object of a true scientific inquiry. In this respect, a study of the brain itself may have certain advantages, namely that it, as a physical object, may be more readily parametrized than "environment" broadly defined.

Eric Turkheimer poses this argument in the context of why behavioral genetics is an undervalued approach in psychology, but it applies to any reasoning supporting psychobiological/behavioral neuroscientific approaches generally.

http://healthpsy.home.ro/files/SCU/3%20laws%20of%20behavioral%20genetics.pdf

>>9137841
I mean, I think things like this could have been predicted by just thinking up the basic effects of Neuroticism on a person's mind.

The only reason such stastistics would be made would be to stastistically prove the effects of Neuroticism, which does add more integrity to the project, but doesn't add much progress to the science.

>>9137860
>What is "environment" but a complex milieu of behavioral contingencies generated as a consequence of one's own and others behaviors? Environment is a complex aggregate of behavior, but it is still behavior, specifically behavior imposing contingencies on an organism. I'm not sure that is a satisfactory answer to the question of what is necessary and sufficient to cause a given behavior, let alone any of the more complex, high level cognitive stuff.

This explanation fails to consider that there are environmental factors outside the control of anyones behavior, such as the wind, or the tides, and other geological events. Then there plants where it is questionable at best as to whether or not they actually behave. While one's behavior affects the environment and in turn those changes can affect future behavior, its not a closed system either.

There are significant disadvantages with trying to explain why behave occurs studying the brain as opposed to the environment, and that would be how much easier it is to manipulate the environment versus one's brain. With changing one's behavior using the brain (in an ethical way), you need to have complex and expensive equipment, know exactly what to manipulate, and the person will realistically be out for hours before you know whether or not a treatment is effective. With the environment, all you need to do is change something external to the person (that's not to say there aren't complex procedures that require consent), but for something simple like "reducing how often someone picks their nose," an environmental treatment will be significantly more useful to the average person.

>>9137865
well its a stepping stone for other research, plus, other factors may not be so intuitive. one issue is that big 5 may not be the only useful factors.

think to advance personality theory though, would be useful to have broader frameworks of psychology or neuroscience.

thats another thing. people assume neuroscience and psychology are completely dependent when i think they depend on eachother quite abit sometimes, depending on your interests.

>>9137865
What in your opinion is the definition of satisfactory progress to the science or any science for that matter? In any discipline, it is rare that the amount of knowledge gained per any single publication is uncommonly great. Furthermore, in no circumstance would such a finding be beyond scrutiny. Good science is by definition the aggregation of many independent, small findings to a point of theoretical consensus over time.

If a finding is valid and reliable over multiple large, independent samples, it is likely the product of good science independent of your subjective feelings of its importance. This said, a finding can be valid and reliable, but explain next to nothing (in terms of statistical effect sizes). It's an interesting debate whether it is any less "good science" if this is the case.

>>9137871
however and whatever you manipulate, i think the focus needs to be on the brain. that usually requires semi to very expensive equipment anyway (e.g. neuroimaging)

>>9137310
got em

>>9137871
True. Any basic researcher who thinks optogenetics/DREADDS are going to become effective treatments for mental illness in their current state of development is off their nut. But make no mistake that palliative intervention to modify behavior will never "cure" disease of disorder primarily marked by behavioral deficits. These interventions may be sufficient to alter some symptoms and bring them into normal ranges, but they are by no means necessary to do so. The promise of intervening at root pathobiological causes implies the promise of true cures--those that are both sufficient and necessary to entirely ameliorate the effects of disorder and disease. We don't have a case study due to the immaturity of neuroscience, but I have faith that it will be demonstrated in our lifetimes.

Clearly, nature does not behave. Perhaps because of this, it even more so begs the question of how such a range of diverse behaviors in response to the simplest of inanimate stimuli can be organized and flexibly deployed in ways that are not deliberately taught. This is the fight that Hull and Tolman argued over for decades. I think it is telling that, in academic circles, neither habit or active problem solving is understood to be the basis of "learning" broadly stated. There is no such thing and it is only through an understanding of the underlying neurobiology that these constructs can be disassociated. Again, Packard & McGaugh, 1996 is an excellent example of this.

>>9137874
>one issue is that big 5 may not be the only useful factors
I remember the development of a HEXACO, which seemed more reliable to me, but still not very explanatory.

I think psychology should indeed develop its own concepts more definitely (which is hopefully being taken care of through the behaviorism branch) before an attempt to merge it with neuroscience is made. The biggest leap it could do now though, in my opinion, is linking it with the foundations of biology. The mind is after all, merely a evolutionary adaptation for the adaptability of animals in their surrounding environment.

>>9137886
My main complaint is that the Big 5 in particular didn't contribute anything at all to the understanding of personality besides creating a categorization system out of associated personality traits. And I doubt it will ever be anything else.

Besides that, I guess it is a pretty robust system, which is good science too.

>>9137934
I see. I agree. Big 5 is an achievement because it allowed for a fundamental insight into the latent factor structure of human personality. By definition, that doesn't explain why anything described by that latent factor structure is the way it is.

Things are going to get really interesting when we can leverage big biological "-omics" data as explanators of dependent variables like Big 5 dimensions. For instance, to what extent can the transcriptome of circulating blood cells predict one's score on psychometrically valid indices of neuroticism? More specifically, what transcripts are disproportionately important or sufficient to do so? What biological processes are these transcripts disproportionately involved in. These are the types of questions were are just now becoming able to routinely ask. But not really, because funding for basic research like this is shit, at least in the States. Totally technologically feasible, though.

>>9137934
i feel like neuroscience actually can do a great deal to help define concepts in psychology desu and i think it has done so, while psychological concepts and tools give meaning to brain architecture.

foundation of biology?

>>9137955
>>9137934

its all too complex. the latent structure is subjective though. the brain is its own complex intractable ecological system. personality isnt fixed pillars in the sand. its a swarm of bees and we are all trying to find the shapes in their movements but it is transient, changing, high dimensional, and the paths that lead to those congifurations at any one moment are even more complex. tis an impossible task.

>>9138001
i had a theory that the latent structures of executive function don't represent cognitive modules as such but are embodiments of the statistical structures of our environment. i was wondering if personality latent structures are similar. one important thing about personality to note though is that if this were the case, it is statistical structures put in terms of approach-avoidance. that seems to be a binding part of personality; it reflects a persons strategies to avoid distress and approach goals.

>>9136916
both OP suggestions are the way i've been leaning for a few years. <3
>>9137934
>>9137968
sounds gr8.

alot of people knew from the start they would be labeled and burned from any contact with psychologists. it's hard enough, my life, i really don't want to be told to trust genomic science, during the era of analytics.

>>9138001
I don't think personality is something that chaotic. Though the chaoticness of people's personality may vary depending on their upbringing, normal people tend to have consistent clusters of personality traits, even if those are slowly changing.

>>9138010
>it reflects a persons strategies to avoid distress and approach goals.
This pretty much.

>>9138438
There really isn't anything more to personality than just a constellation of behavior.

>>9138001
Define complex in something other than vague statements of impossibility. One of the reasons psychology is so pseudoscientific is that its supporters so often resist casting the problems it looks at in some finite, parametric space. Will it be a perfect fit? Of course not, but we can objectively measure its predictive performance and stability across independent data sets. This goes a long way.

The alternative of just throwing your hands up in defeat is silly and self-defeating. We incrementally build many such models in science and engineering that are imperfect, yet have predictive value and suggest fundamental underlying structure in the data they describe. This is the entire point of data mining. To suggest that this is not of values is absurd.

What I am telling you is that we know that the test-retest (reliablility) measure for personality testing using well-validated batteries is pretty high. Also, the latent factor structures are stable across independent cohorts, time, and even cultures. You are suggesting a level of parametric complexity that isn't empirically warranted in the least. It's almost like you don't want to think something like personality could in fact reduce to something so relatively simple.

>>9137955
>biological "-omics" data as explanators of dependent variables like Big 5 dimensions
I think personality is derived mostly from environmental history. Physiological or genetic factors can't predict how a individual's personality is going to develop by themselves, instead acting as part of the environment of the individual.

Furthermore, it's impossible to create metrical scales to quantify personality traits due to the unavoidable subjectivity during tests (for example, how could a difference of 1 or 0.1 in a hypothetical Neuroticism meter even be interpreted?). Instead, I'd propose some kind of rank-based conceptual system to fit the results of the personality tests (for example, dividing types of Neuroticism according to "turning-point" actions or attitudes in the person's behavior). As I said, personality traits aren't gradually-changing properties, but rather growing paradigms in the individual's trial-and-error mental library.

Alternatively, you could measure and predict the Mood and Temperament of an individual through physiological or genetic factors alone, whereas the Personality will be made from the interaction of these factors with the environment. In my view, you could just say that the Temperament of an individual is defined by its genetics, the Personality is defined by the surrounding environment and the individual's current Mood can be defined by its current physiological factors. These three factors are the most relevant on my view of human personality, at least.

>>9136916

lets be honest, most people in the social sciences are there to change the fields and to "prove" their agenda is true. it's really not that scientific at all. it used to be that radical racists were the heads of these fields and it was garbage. now it's the opposite, radical egalitarians are the heads of these fields and it's also garbage. they cannot objectively consider human beings.

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>>9136916
You're actually mentally handicapped. Your only example as to why psychology is busted is because of personality psych? It's a fucking joke and even professors in the field know it.

Time to admit psychhaters won and effectively DELETED every other branch of psychology from /sci/'s coherent memory.

>>9139514
What about behavior analysis which has originated from people who studied animal behavior and applied what they found to humans?

>>9139540
Can't be helped, psychology itself seem to have forgotten about the other psychology branches.

>>9139463
Is your mood now solely determined by your physiology then?

>>9139567
Only really applies to neuroscience. You can't build psychological theories from animals effectively.

>>9139657
Most people on 4chan comment about psychology based on stereotypes, not actual experience. Otherwise most of them wouldnt think that psychology is dominated by humanities/freudian subjectivist stuff (not to say other types of psyhology studies arent/cant be crap).People will happily criticise it but they probably won't be able to give you an actual example apart from IQ, freud shit and maybe the big 5 here.

>>9136960
Even if you have perfect cellular understanding of the brain you still need to link that behavior to human behavior, which as psychology has shown is almost infinetly complicated and vague. You'd run into the same problem.

>>9139674
Yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned that mood part at all, but yes, physiological factors can have a direct effect on overall mood.

>>9139540
Personality psych is my main branch of interest, senpai. I actually really hope you're not implying it is a branch with no future.

Also, where are ur arguments? Let it all out.

>>9139974
This.
Even if we knew how neurons and brain compounds worked and developed over time in detail, we'd still need to know how the mind itself is developed in contrast and how it varies between individuals. Studying behavior is ultimately essential for figuring out how the brain works.

most of the current problems in psychology have to deal with statistical analysis.

given there is a similar field that also uses statistical analysis in their findings.
that is MEDICINE.

something to note. that if you are trained instatisitcal analysis and understand the vocabulary (chi-square, standard deviations, p<.05, degrees of freedome, Z scores and so on...) then interpreting said research isn't a problem. Anyone versed in these can look at a psychological experiment, and tell if the study is crap or not.

next is the "internal expierence" of the subject, is very hard to quantify, even on the sbjects terms. I find however that literature, and continential philosophy do this quite well.

So my suggestion to "fix" psychology.
-people need to try and keep their own fucking egos out of their research, and quit trying to protect said egos

-keep psychiatry/cognitive science/neurology as a science and lump it in with medicine

-move psychology to philosophy or continential philosophy/existentialism. since most of the questions psychology asks are really just finer tuned questions coming from the existentialists.

-and seeing as how a piece of literature is supremely more useful to ones understanding of the human condition than a pop psychology self-help book.

>>9136916
>For instance, the Big Five personality model at its core is absolutely arbitrary and doesn't actually explain anything on how personalities work

What are you talking about!? Myers-Briggs and standardized IQ tests are perfectly scientific!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NQqSnkI32A
Oh, wait...

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>>9140016
>Myers-Briggs

>>9140013
Another completely ignorant person kek

>>9140013
Indeed, some branches (mainly older ones) of psychology could be just lumped with philosophy since they deal much more with introspective models of mind/thought than scientific observations.

Though I think some branches should stay as the scientific study of behavior (which might be connected to neurology later on), such as behaviorism, personality psych, behavorial analysis, etc.

As for psychiatry, neurology and some psychology branches related to mental illness, they're definitely in the domains of Medicine, even if they also need to interact with the realm of the other branches of psychology occasionally. Psychiatry is a good example of this, since you can't just pretend that certain drugs can cure mental illnesses without looking on the patient's psychological background.

>>9140013

See this
>>9139680

>>9140016

>He can't name some low IQs who advanced civilization or amassed hoards of wealth.
>Can't adress how violent criminals score low on IQ.

Shouldn't you be pretendig Alpha Males aren't a thing?

>>9140068
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU

>>9137622
It would be unscientific to assume different people are largely identical and standardized like reagents. The difficulty with reproducibility is due to complexity which is hard to deal with currently.

>>9137622
Are you a scientist?

>>9140090
Then stop calling psychology science.

>>9140068
>He can't name some low IQs who advanced civilization or amassed hoards of wealth.
Who are the Aztecs?

>Can't adress how violent criminals score low on IQ.
Education affects IQ radically. How many well educated violent criminals are there?

Plenty of non-violent ones though.

Not saying niggers aren't stupid, mind ye, but IQ is psychometry, psychometry is psychology, ergo, IQ is a shit standard. Play Tetris for a week before your IQ points and it will shoot up 20 or so points. Take an IQ test within a week of your last IQ test, and it will shoot up 20 or so points. Take your IQ test just before your next meal, and it'll drop 20 or so points. Come back when you have some *neurological* measurement to work with that's relatively static for at least a week, not some arbitrary test simply based around how much time you spend solving puzzles and memorizing numbers in your life, and that isn't, in the end, just piss-ant psychology crap originally designed to make some problem children better about themselves.

>>9136974
Thats like describing a soccer match with quantum physics

>>9140152

>Aztecs
>WE WUZ

Redskins and Beaner Mongrels are both less intelligent. Anyway, I'll wait for you to list all the notable scientists, millionares and up, Fortune 500 founders CEOs who'd score lowly in IQ.

>Education affects IQ radically.

That addresses how Niggers score lowly in IQ and other measures despite decades of pandering.

>Play Tetris for a week before your IQ points and it will shoot up 20 or so points. Take an IQ test within a week of your last IQ test, and it will shoot up 20 or so points. Take your IQ test just before your next meal, and it'll drop 20 or so points

I'll wait for all the respectable and relevant peer reviewed sources for this.

>Come back when you have some *neurological* measurement to work with that's relatively static for at least a week, not some arbitrary test simply based around how much time you spend solving puzzles and memorizing numbers in your life, and that isn't, in the end, just piss-ant psychology crap originally designed to make some problem children better about themselves.

Found the Leftist.

>>9140188
>Fortune 500 founders CEOs who'd score lowly in IQ
For all the claims of Fortune 500 members having high IQs, in reality, they are, on average, below the average of their race and class, coming close to 112 where it should be closer to 125, as one would usually expect from well educated and affluent Jews.

The rest is just moving goal posts, or pure ignorance as to what a professionally administered IQ test actually entails. You aren't allowed to have them more than once a year for a reason, and a variance of even 50 points over five years is considered normal.

As for leftism, you're the one defending psychology originally designed to make problem children feel better about themselves.

Niggers are stupid, not denying that, but IQ tests make for poor proof one way or the other.

>>9140133
So if physics suddenly became unreplicable it wouldnt be a science?

Dont you think your thoughts lack the nuance of an intelligent person?

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>every thread devolves into a /pol/ thread because they are so afraid of science they raid a 4chan board thinking it will change reality

>>9140214
>So if physics suddenly became unreplicable it wouldnt be a science?
Not him, but yes.

At the same time, that'd probably be the least of our concerns - assuming we could have any concerns.

>>9140188
>>9140152
Fuck off /pol/ you both idiots why you even arguing with eachother.

>>9140219
So even if the methodology was identical? Wow youre an idiot. Thing is, psychology clearly does have recplicability or there would be no theories or reliable psychological tools.

>>9140222
More so if the methodology is identical. If it is replicable in one field and not another, then one field has some fundamental problems.

Mind, there's world of difference between theoretical psychology and applied psychology, and rarely do the two meet up. Oddly, there's even less replicability in the latter than the former, and yet the latter has had the better results, despite being even less scientific, and more art than practice.

>>9140228
No im talking about before and after the sudden change.

I imagine you subscribe to the "anything goes" tradition of science then? Aslong as its replicable. I find this hard to swallow because it takes out all necessity for the people doing the science to have some sort of critical nature and rigor to their methodology.

>>9140233
Replicability is the critical nature and rigor of science.

Not saying you can't still work with things that aren't replicable when forced to - science isn't everything - but if it can't meet that criteria, it ceases to be science.

Transgenderism is no less fake than the multiverse or strong theory.

Most modern physics will never be testable.

>>9140237
i struggle with this. im sure physics in the past wasnt necessarily as replicable as it is today. im sure that there are replicability problems in physics somewhere but people dont publish failures. another thing is that you have to scrutinise the people that did the replication study.

>>9139676
You can if your observations can also be applied to humans (and they can). From operant conditioning, to schedules of reinforcement, to delay discounting, animal testing has found behavioral phenomena that can apply to both animals and humans.

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Goddamn it, why psychometrics is such fucking cancer? Who the fuck thought simplifying complex structures such as human beings with stastistical numbers without accounting in their environment and psychosocial circumstances would lead anywhere?

By looking at those studies, it's becoming more than obvious to me that people are highly dependent on their environment, yet no studies trying to understand how different people function in their envinroment is made. People really need to stop trying to generalize people like this. They could find the answers to these questions whenever they want, but they'd rather cling to muh semi-predictive latent factors.

>>9136916
Scrap it and start over but with core principles retained. Like how alchemy turned into chemistry once we figured out how atoms worked.

Although I guess there hasn't been a discovery analogous to the discovery of the atom in psychology.

>>9141282
But we already did, multiple times.
Why do you think radically different branches such as Object Relations Theory, Behaviorism, Evolutionary Psychology and Behavior Analysis came to exist?

>>9140578
Yes true i dunno what i was thinking desu.

>>9136921
This study got so much publicity when it came out but no one talked about how the study was found to contain a major statistical error that made many positive results look negative and once it was fixed the number of unreplicated resultz was around what was expected despite many if the studies being done in a very half assed way.

If anything psychology does a far better job with reproducibility that other sciences like biomedical or genetics.

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>>9140005
As a psych student who has 6 years of courses and no biased attraction to any particular branch of psychology, I can say without a doubt that personality psychology is the flimsiest and least useful. The only application is for businesses to utilize a somewhat semi-credible entry test for new applicants so they know which ones are gay and which aren't. I'm ashamed and disgusted that you would choose personality psych so you can continue to contribute nothing like you've done so well thus far in your life.

>>9140013
>if you are trained in statistical analysis
It's an undergrad requirement.
>next is the "internal experience"
Quantification is not a premise to what make science science.
>egos
Tell me you're not using a psychology term to say psychology needs to be fixed
>keep psychiatry/cognitive science/neurology as a science and lump it in with medicine
nobody in the field of medicine came up with the concepts why should that field get credit for psychology's payouts?
>move psychology to philosophy
Two very sperate things. Psych aims to figure out the human mind. Philosophy aims to figure out the nature of the world.
>pop psychology self-help book
I'm not even sure what that last point was. I would have omitted it if I were you but here's a point not many people get to. Psychology is responsible for therapy which is responsible for mental healing with the absence of pills and injections.

>>9141473
>Two very sperate things. Psych aims to figure out the human mind
>human mind
What now.

>>9141549
Probably more accurate to say that Psychology aims to predict and coerce human behavior, seeking to optimize and correct it, according to what is ideal for the society in which it is practiced.

Philosophy more often asks questions of the society itself, sometimes of reality itself, in an attempt to determine what one should do, rather than what one will do or how to encourage a specific set of behaviors.

Neither is science through and through, and while both often involve rigor of replication or falsifiable logic and both often overlap with less nebulous fields, they are quite different disciplines exploring quite different questions.

what kind of redundant autism did you just make me read OP? Are you fuckin around here?
>""id say a biological aproach like those in evolutionary psychology or ethology"
>implying evolutionary psychology isn't psychology
>implying instinctual behavior isn't psychological
>posts image of retard
U wan sum m8? ill giv it ya

>>9141457
What about the study of mental health or life outcomes you fucking shill

>>9141753
Any questions that psychology asks about the human mind

philosophy/THeory of Mind also asks.

>>9141473
Quantification is a very important step if you wish to use the scientific process, and make reproducable experiments.
as an addendum I should add that the most important research in psychology yet the least abundant is longitudinal studies.
it is a challenge to complete longitudinal studies but like medicine if we need to find out the long term implications then I think we need to have "lifetime" participants in psychological experiments.

its been proven that people feel better after reading a real good peice of literature about the human condition rather than some author writing a book that says will solve your problems so he can drink a more expensive wine.

I have always said its better to live life literally than healthy.Mainly because without new experiences something sleeps in man and seldom awakens. I believe this thing to be the will. Which is what psychology is all about doing, improving your will.

also Freud was a physician, and William James was a philosopher.
Freud was the first psychoanalyst
William James wrote the first american textbook on psychology.

>>9141780
Unproven claim after Unproven claim *sigh*. And english clearly isnt your first language

>>9141780
>Any questions that psychology asks about the human mind philosophy/THeory of Mind also asks.
Not generally speaking... I mean, I suppose it *could* - you can ask anything in philosophy after all - but philosophy rarely asks how best to adjust individuals for society. Usually it asks how best to adjust society, fundamentally, for individuals, which is all but taboo in psychology, and exactly the point in which psychologists will tell you that you've drifted from psychology to philosophy/religion.

Psychology certainly doesn't ask quests of the core nature of physics and meaning of reality, the way philosophy does. Similarly, philosophy rarely, if ever, asks about developmental behavior, favoring, as they would like to say, ought over is.

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>>9141457
>least useful
If we understood how personality works or how it develops through one's life, we'd be able to predict how and why depression, personality disorders and emotional disorders take place and how they can be fixed.

Not only that, but as you said, we could be able to predict people's lives, environment and achievement potential just by looking at their personality. That could also be used to explain sociological events by assigning the personality types of people that participate or influence them.

How can you say that the understanding of the long-term development of the mind is useless. I'm the one who should be dissapointed here, and indeed, I am very.

What do other branches even do? What good would studying how memory works or how your precious IQ can predict stuff in comparison. I sincerely hope you deliver a honest, non-petty answer.

>>9141759
You didn't get it, m80.
Go reread it.

>>9141785
>unattributed criticism after baseless criticism.

perhaps you could enlighten me

>>9141792
you either have only talked to someone who's read Sasz or read the wikipedia on it.

Freud thought psychology/psychoanalysis was about letting people live full lives. Not to conform to society, which is what Thomas Sasz criticizes psychology of doing.

You are generalizsing both psychology and philosophy and it makes me want to vomit.
Also psychology looks more into, how can everyone obey society? There cognitive psychology which asks things like how to we rememeber things, how do our eyes see or our brains translate the signla s from the eye, same with the nose and ears, and mouth.
It talks about how fast it takes to react.

and philosophy does look at developmental behavior, in ethics there was a big switch from medieval understanding of children (little adults)
to the contemporary understanding of children being (pre-adults, or growing into adulthood).

>>9141805
>implying I didn't get it because I don't agree with the idea of breaking the idea of psychology as a whole into separate categories
>implying because one method of practice seems better than another that means the whole thing needs to be fixed
get the fuck out of here with this bait, what are you, 13 years old?

>>9141815
While I won't say you aren't entirely without your points, modern psychology doesn't take Freud very seriously, being considered a sort of proto-psychologist at this point. Cognitive psychology doesn't ask why remember things, it asks how we can change the way we associate things so as to better function in our society, and is indeed the current main stream. What you're describing, about reaction time "how do our eyes see and translate signals", and the like, is neurology. A modern psychologist might ask what emotional conditions and stressors may affect those responses, but that's about as close as they come to treading there, until you get into neurochemical psychiatry.

Though, oddly, while I do have a BA in Psychology, which I more or less gave up on after a horrific experience as an intern at College Hospital, I've not read Sasz.

>>9140090 >>9136916
If you can't reproduce/replicate then stop calling it science.
It's just a kind of philosophy, not a science.

>>9141826
Then why didn't you just say so? Besides, the thread already clarified your proposition if you didn't care to read a bit into it.

Stop being such an autist.

>>9142031
>modern psychology doesn't take Freud very seriously,
Brainlets, Normies (ordinary people) & some professors still take the pervert Freud very seriously though.

>>9142054
See >>9141441 and Google it if you don't believe me. Psychology did actually extremely well with replicating results.

It uses the scientific method so it's a science. Stop being so autistic.

>>9142054
But it does. Everyday in our everyday lives. Just because it can't be replicated on a enclosed lab doesn't mean it can't be replicated. Psychological concepts replicate naturally in their respective envinronments, which can be observed scientifically.

If ecology can do it, then why can't psychology?

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>>9142063
>implying there aren't retarded pop-sci normies in every goddamn field of science

Have you learned nothing from this place?

>>9142031
I know Brainlet guy who study in my University who idolize & love Freud books. He read Freud books everyday. The brainlet wanna major in psychology & He considers Freud as the greatest intellectual in History.
I personally hate Freud, Freud work is bullshit. I tried to convince the stubborn Brainlet to stop reading Freud Shitty books. In vain.

>>9142076

Freud admitted that his work was only a bridge until we could get into the nitty gritty physical details of the brain.

The problem is that most of the people attracted to the field are verbally gifted, not mechanically gifted.

If you're verbally gifted, it's a nice ability to parse (actual) data into a communicable framework. If you don't have actual data, you play abstract games that have nothing to do with what's going on in the system you're talking about.

They're hampered by the inability to see the type of intelligence they have and one of its major weaknesses (mechanical verification). What they can describe in words becomes "real", not the mechanics that could be verified with visual imagination.

The best psych. I ever saw was a former construction worker. Which makes sense since construction is about putting together visual objects in a way that works, makes sense, and is verified by whether it falls apart or not. The psych in question was a fan of the "drama/play of relationships" form of analysis. Where each person plays a "role" in the family.

EX: "Black sheep" have the role of troublemaker and are the people who the rest of the family focuses on without having to examine their own troubles.

>>9141780
>Any questions that psychology asks about the human mind, philosophy/THeory of Mind also asks.
>human mind
There is that word again. There isn't any reason to believe that the human mind exists at all.

>>9142143
>The psych in question was a fan of the "drama/play of relationships" form of analysis
A pretty similar type of psychological aproach to personality is stated on the OP, if that's what you mean.

>EX: "Black sheep" have the role of troublemaker
Though your typology model seems like a garbage one honestly. It's all just name-calling, isn't it?

>Which makes sense since construction is about putting together visual objects in a way that works, makes sense
Not really.

>>9142031
>What you're describing, about reaction time "how do our eyes see and translate signals", and the like, is neurology.

this actually proves that most undergrads actually dont know anything about their own fields.

>>9142143
>>9142076
>>9142031

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/133/4/1265/307446

An account of freudian theory in terms of modern neurobiology and computational neuroscience.

"Abstract
This article explores the notion that Freudian constructs may have neurobiological substrates. Specifically, we propose that Freud’s descriptions of the primary and secondary processes are consistent with self-organized activity in hierarchical cortical systems and that his descriptions of the ego are consistent with the functions of the default-mode and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. This neurobiological account rests on a view of the brain as a hierarchical inference or Helmholtz machine. In this view, large-scale intrinsic networks occupy supraordinate levels of hierarchical brain systems that try to optimize their representation of the sensorium. This optimization has been formulated as minimizing a free-energy; a process that is formally similar to the treatment of energy in Freudian formulations. We substantiate this synthesis by showing that Freud’s descriptions of the primary process are consistent with the phenomenology and neurophysiology of rapid eye movement sleep, the early and acute psychotic state, the aura of temporal lobe epilepsy and hallucinogenic drug states."

I like psychology but I lack serious training in statistics. So, I'm likely missing the point.
But to me, just because the Big Five:
>were derived from statistical analysis of natural language terms that people use to describe eachother and themselves.
... does not convince me. I'm not convinced that animals describing themselves is fully accurate. Though I've read about neuroscience supporting the Big Five, so that's a good beginning.
And I'm under the impression that personality is environment dependent. Why do you have to be either neurotic or not, or introverted or not, when you could be both, depending on the environment?

Another point is abnormal psychology. Would a statistical analysis of language terms find autism, borderline and psychopathy to be there?
>>9136960
>>9142143
I'm under the impression that mechanical views on humans did more harm than good. I think biological and perhaps a systems science view and so on works better. Organic systems and mechanical systems don't work the same as far as I know.

The comment suggesting that psychology should come under the branch of continental philosophy was the worst one here.

>>9142188
>by showing that Freud’s descriptions of the primary process are consistent with the phenomenology and neurophysiology of rapid eye movement sleep, the early and acute psychotic state, the aura of temporal lobe epilepsy and hallucinogenic drug states

Please don't tell me it's just trying to fit Freud's vague terms into the vague structures recently discovered by neurology, is it? Freud's early model of mind is like a horoscope, you can fit it anywhere and it'll seem like it works.

>>9142245
Big 5 works in that it has 5 dimensions and everyone has a score on each direction so you can be both neurotic and introverted. The big 5 doesn't give each person a label that describes them. It works in scales. E.g. one scale is from introversion to extraversion. Just for simplicity on a 0 - 100 scale, you could get 50 which is bang in the middle. Or 33, or 76.

You're right people describing eachother will not be fully accurate both for subjectivity and methodological reasons. But the terms do group statistically into 5 latent factors. The big 5 though doesn't have any theory explaining them though.

Im sure the statistical analysis of language terms would work on mental illness but you need to have the right terms. As i understand, psychologists of the time would just find all sorts of generic terms that people use to describe eachother or themselves. I guess mental illness isn't described in generic terms though because they are relatively rare. Things like anxiety and depression though, im sure actually overlap quite alot with neuroticism in terms used to describe them.

>>9142252
its quite a sophisticated article. i dont think the article is supposed to prove freud per se. freud obviously knew nothing about the things in the article. I think one of the ideas is that if you can form a convincing analogy between freud and modern neuroscience, it gives more ground for psychoanalysis.

Tbf, hypotheses of adaptation can suffer similar problems of fit. The computational theory that is fit to freud in this paper also has similar problems but the weird thing is that its meant to. It was developed in machine learning to make learning easier and it was designed/found that so long as you view a system as a model, it can be described by this computational theory.

>>9142272
Thanks for the input.
Note, I am fully aware it is in scales and that is my objection. I did not mean that you either have to be neurotic or introverted. I meant that you either have to be high on neuroticism or low on neuroticism, or in the middle.
Though I guess if, say, you have dopamine or serotonin, and that is associated with one of the Big Five traits. So, we see that more dopamine is associated with more and more openness, I guess that would settle it more or less.

And I know of research which associates certain disorders with specific Big Five scores.

>>9142295
The labels and scores are trying to quantify something stable about people. These are typified by certain behaviours which people have a tendency to do. But just because e.g. you are extremely low neuroticism, doesnt mean that you cant be angry or sad at certain times, given your environment. But the labels are trying to look at your average behaviour over a long period of time (theoretically)

>>9142396
>But the labels are trying to look at your average behaviour over a long period of time
It's like trying to find the average height of a pond that is constantly changing. Instead of trying to find a innate "latent factor" within it, why not try to look around on what is causing the pond to change.

Humans can't be properly studied like this.

>>9142396
I'm >>9142295
From what've read behavior does indeed have a genetic component. And a neuroscientist claims that personality around a certain age (I thought 25, but couldn't find it again) stabilizes.
I've also read personality research on animals though they sometimes use different terms like bold vs shy (I think it was).
That aside, I think your reply assumes I have a simplistic view. I do not think at all that low neuroticism means that you cannot be angry or sad at certain times. And with the research I'm familiar with it is also not suprising that people come with predispositions that make certain behaviour more likely or even - perhaps - a given (twin studies showed this).
Yet with all that I still think the scale is too simplistic. If we assume - I'm not saying it is - that stress hormones and neuroticism are linked, that would mean that social rank determines personality and that personality is not stable. To avoid more confusion; I base that on research on monkeys which state that those of the highest rank and those on the lowest rank have the most stress hormones.

>>9142626
>And a neuroscientist claims that personality around a certain age (I thought 25, but couldn't find it again) stabilizes
There's a reason you can't find it.

There's drastic hormonal and behavioral changes come the 30's, 40's, and 60's. And, of course, just colloquially speaking, there's not a lot of 50 year-olds that act like 25 year-olds (not that it doesn't happen, but it's an aberration sufficient enough to make one a social pariah among your peers). Neurologically speaking, the changes are significant enough between those two ages that it's hard to call them the same person. Biologically and materially speaking, even more so, as you're nearly a Ship of Theseus situation, in terms of cell replacement.

>>9142874
>but it's an aberration sufficient enough to make one a social pariah among your peers
I wonder how much of what we know as the average brain/mind development scale is maintaned purely out of societal pressure or because of our modern way of life rather than genetical or innate factors.

Just because we see physiological symptoms arise at those age, it doesn't mean that it is strictly because of our genetical limits. It may be the other way around in that our physiology is highly dictated by the pace of our brain/mind (and by extension, the pace of our mind is highly dictated by social norms). I just think the brain may be way more malleable than we think.

A counterargument to this may be how animals tend to have highly predictable brain development and highly specific sexual rituals. Don't know if these are innate or environmental too though.

>>9142893
>Just because we see physiological symptoms arise at those age, it doesn't mean that it is strictly because of our genetical limits.
Well there's definitely related epigenetic/hormonal changes involved, in addition to, yes, social expectations.

One does need to keep in mind that there is almost no limit to how much you can warp "human nature". There are civilizations that lasted for hundreds of years, that ate their babies every time it rained on a full moon - nevermind all the bizarre things we take for granted today in our own society.

>>9142521

I don't look at it as a theory of personality. I look at it in the same way you would look at a neuropsychological test. It's supposed to measure a construct validly and reliably. Just like you would look at a working memory or IQ. Maybe the big five aren't appropriate for looking at those kinds of things and isn't the best tool (like some argue for IQ) but I don't think it is in any way obliged to be a theory of causes. Researchers are free to study them or theorise. I see alot of studies linking the big five to other variables but not much on the causes of personality. Could be partly because of the big five but also its a very complicated topic.

Maybe personality is just too big for us atm to have a good theory about it. I feel somehow maybe we would have to have a deeper knowledge/theories of the brain because in a way, personality is like a summary of your global output of behaviour.

The only way I can think of psychology becoming rigorous is if they start to analyze human behavior in the way we analyze reinforcement learning algorithms.

>>9142626
>I think your reply assumes I have a simplistic view

I'm merely replying to

>Why do you have to be either neurotic or not, or introverted or not, when you could be both, depending on the environment?

I clearly don't understand what you mean by this.

> that stress hormones and neuroticism are linked, that would mean that social rank determines personality and that personality is not stable

This statement doesn't actually follow.

>>9142874
What was the reason it can't be found?

>>9140188
Amerindians suffered 90% genocide, murdered elites and middle classes, assimilated the rest of the priviledged classes and the low classes got enslaved on toxic mines for 4 centuries.

Incas were superior to europeans. You literally cannot prove me wrong. Deal with it, subhuman.

>>9142897
i agree that i think the brain is malleable. Environment certainly has a powerful if not the leading role in development (i'll put it out there just to be controversial when usually i'd be more measured). I think the issue is that maybe its incredibly difficult to intentionally make changes to the self.

Quite a few neuroscientists have started theorising that quite abit of the grey matter loss as we get older might be due to environment.

>>9142935
but reinforcement learning is a relatively small matter in our brain/lives/psychology.

>>9142984
I really disagree with this.

>>9142933
I guess at least the Big Five is somewhat consistent and is proving a lot of stuff stastistically.

>Maybe personality is just too big for us atm
Personality really isn't that much of a complicated mess. You'd just have to check on the emotio-cognitive effects that environmental events cause on people, which is most certainly what constructs their personality and models their temperament. Reinforcement learning (prolly with a bit of the cognitive factor too) all the way, m8.

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>>9142984
Never in my life have I needed a Constanza reaction image in such magnitude.

>>9142985
Justify ?

>>9143044
Justify your statement first, my little poltard.

>>9136916
Personality is extremely complicated.
I've been studying humor, and while there's evolutionary value, it stems to learned, social, and biological.

Humor has so many layers (especially in learned for psychology emphasis), and it's just a part of personality.

The reason for all these facets probably has to do with the brain having so many areas the information is processed through, sometimes multiple times with slight variations.

>>9143008
Yes, i see the way to study it, though maybe it might be quite a costly area of research (which i think maybe why there isn't really alot of research on it that goes further than heritability). I think the problem is more so in developing a good framework in which to interpret those findings. Having a conceptualisation of personality because the big five aren't good enough for that because they are purely statistical constructs.

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>>9143064
Humor gets less difficult to understand once you find out about primary emotions and figure out their relationship with happiness.

>>9143052
Well my intuition is that reinforcement learning's concentration on making optimal decisions based on reward limits its ability to deal with the brain - with complex things such as personality which are very multidimensional. Reinforcement learning doesn't capture enough aspects of cognition or the brain i.e. in neuroscience it only really deals with the striatum and midbrain and cannot model the cortex. Another thing is that in reinforcement learning, reward is unexplained when this is one of the most important things we must explain in psychology. Belief-based modelling seems to be a better option.

>>9143064
humors one of those things i cant guess what its for or about or how it started or why things are funny etc etc.

>>9143096
It explains why we are motivated to do things and to not like some things, which is the base in which the rest of the mind rests on. And of course it is not the only thing that works in the brain, so having it coexist with Belief-based modeling should be fine.

>in neuroscience it only really deals with the striatum and midbrain and cannot model the cortex.
It makes sense to me personally, since reinforcement is very old evolutionary mind function in animals. It would make sense for it to be located in a somewhat primitive portion of the brain and not on the cortex (in which recent cognitive abilities are usually associated with).

We also need to consider what to do with all the psychologists currently playing, practicing, and studying the field right now. I would marry a yandere (or play with fire and handle a few), but unfortunately the psychological profession has become so willfully and voluntarily entrapped such that it is inbedded with larger localized networks.

>>9143078
>>9143101
It goes deeper than that.
Why do we laugh at certain things?
My leading hypothesis is that we get overwhelmed with emotion when we make a connection relating two or more things. Stemming from that and other evolutionary perspectives (since not all connections make laughter) we have agreement, superiority, incongruity, and benign-violation theories. On top of that we have moods, chemistry, social influences and situations, interpretation, imperfect memory, etc.

>>9143168
I'm guessing it's a stress-relief response to dealing with absurdity causing a brief "brain stall", but it's odd that it would be enjoyable - even beneficial, and in most societies, sought after (though there's some rare exceptions that abhor laughter). Maybe scavengers that enjoyed challenging their internal paradigms more often, came up with more ideas for scavenging, and thus lived to breed more often, as well as indirectly helping ensure their progeny did the same in turn.

I suppose if laughter wasn't a response to the absurd, one could get stuck dwelling on it a lot longer, and were it not enjoyable, one might avoid analysis of situations more.

Specularamma though, not read much on the subject.

>>9143122
It doesnt explain motivation...

I just think it is outdated, uses rewsrd as a homunculus, cuts certain assumptions about the mind and doesnt approximate how it works v. Well.

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>>9143168
Fuck, I thought you meant mood. Disregard that statement about primary emotions then.

>>9143350
Indeed, though no matter how absurd a situation may be, if it is harming you, you'll not feel humor about it and you'll probably dwell on it anyway.

I suspect humor in humans is some manifestation of the animals' tendency to play with each other, which has been proven to be a tendency present in most intelligent animals (dolphins, ravens and other social animals).

It's a form of playing with abstract concepts, which probably helps to compel people to socialize with each other. Though I can't begin to fathom how it might have originated. May have something to do with tickles, which works in a similar way.

>>9143567
It does explain why we like things. And liking things is what makes us develop complex motivations in the first place.

>>9143168
but what is laughter?

>>9143597
not all humor is abstract though.

>>9143600
no, it explains how we choose things. how can it explain why we like things if it just sets up an arbitrary function that you maximise. And no, it can't explain motivation because motivation is ingrained in the algorithm. all it is is trying to model optimal control. it doesn't explain anything by itself.

This behavioural analysis thing, it's just applied behaviourism?

>land myself in clinical psychology
>it's just teaching people how not to be retards
I need something else to do

>>9143653
yes

>>9143653
not exactly

According to a certain encyclopedia, there's applied behavorial analysis and experimental behavioral analysis.

>>9143638
Oh. So I guess I was just mistaking it for classical conditioning theory. My bad.

>>9143636
All humor deals with absurdity at the point of not taking it seriously, which is usually made through abstract thinking.

You wouldn't see an animal reacting like this to an absurd event, only humans do this. Most animals' ways of playing are based on physical contact, in contrast.

>>9143898
but i dont think its any more abstract than what we think and do normally? i think some animals can like apes for sure.

>>9144063
Never heard of it, but if apes can also display humor, then they might offer an interesting explaining to humor's evolutionary functions.

>but i dont think its any more abstract than what we think and do normally
Yeah. Most animals can't do what we do normally. Their way of playing with each other doesn't involve any intercommunication of concepts, in contrast to our way of playing with humor, which I assume is entirely based on abstracting funny concepts.

>>9143898
How would you define absurdity?

>>9144138
nooo, i mean humor being more abstract than other types of our own thought.

>>9144143
I think absurdity is defined by novel relations between different concepts.

>>9142984
No its not. Operant conditioning is fundamental to nearly all human behavior. From eating, to going to university, to going out partying. Almost all human behavior can be explained through operant conditioning (those that can't can be explained through various forms of respondent conditioning).

>>9143806
They both have the same underlying assumptions regarding behavior, they just apply the principles of behavior in different settings; applied being towards social issues and experimental being towards basic research.

>>9144150
Yes, it is as abstract.

>>9144379
I'm not sure about this, babies come out doing stuff don't they?

>>9144424
Babies are also susceptible to operant conditioning and respondent conditioning, just like other animals. Sure, there are reflexes, but that really doesn't explain much of relevant human behavior.

>>9136916
>Big Five
>arbitrary
Think again.

>>9137063
Nature informs nurture. Nurture is the more dominant influence, but nature cannot be escaped.

Nurture is your environment; a significant part of your environment and how you fit into it is yourself is nature. I'm not really sure why people are still arguing about these things.

>>9144379
theres better ways to explain it than operant conditioning i think. but operant conditioning "explains" relatively little of our cognition. Doesn't explain executive function, episodic or semantic memory, spatial navigation, attention, perceptual learning, motor control. And furthermore, operant conditioning doesn't explain why or how we find things rewarding. Nor does it explain things like curiosity or exploration.

Whats respondent conditioning?

>>9140016
Myers-Briggs is garbage. Big 5 and IQ tests are perfectly useful and repeatable.

Don't lumps things together just because you don't understand them.

>>9141196
Are you aware of the history and utility of ceterus paribus as a scientific concept?

>>9136916
>What would be a better approach for studying the human mind?

a collection of Boltzmann machines. that both operate and train at the same time. the more they operate, the less they train

>>9144552
>cognition
You act as this is something that is relevant to understanding human behavior at all. Mentalistic explanations like cognition/attention are unnecessary assumptions to understanding behavior, you are able to explain "Student placed in front of task, they engage in behaviors not related to the task" without relying on the assumption that attention is a thing, as adding "he isn't paying attention" at best is just short hand for the behavior described and at worse is an unnecessary assumption that doesn't add anything.

As for more complicated phenomonon see the vid and study linked here: >>9137792
to understand why we don't need assumptions like cognition or "a sense of self" to explain behavior.

Operant conditioning is actually able to explain behavior through the deprivation-satiation model, which asserts that something will be reinforcing to behavior based on the baseline rate of that thing/behavior. For example, if someone normally eats every six hours, depriving them of food for 10 hours will allow for consuming food to reinforce any response that allows that person to eat. Likewise, if we have that person eat within the last hour, eating food will no longer be as strong of a reinforcer. The strength of this model is that it ignores unnecessary assumptions like curiosity (something we have no reason to believe exists outside of describing behavior), as it is based entirely on the observable environment.

Respondent conditioning is really just another name for classical conditioning.

The thing I have a hard time understanding with /sci/ is that they like to call psychology a pseudoscience, but they themselves have a hard time abandoning the unscientific notions of psychology that are spoken about throughout their every day lives, things like emotions and other internal states causing behavior.

>>9144580
>Operant conditioning is actually able to explain behavior
Just to clear something here, I meant: operant conditioning is able to explain why something is reinforcing to behavior

>>9144548
Yes but arguably nature determines things like how you learn from your environment via the genes attatched to neurotransmitters or synapses and that shit which mediates learning or other shit like basic fear responses etc etc.

I don't think either nature or nurture can be said to be more dominant; they are just aspects of the same process which is impossible without either. Nurture's effects are contingent on genes and genes effects are contingent on nurture.

>>9144580
I think when you start defining behaviour in this way, the word behaviour gets called into question because your definition gets fuzzier. I'd prefer to do it the other way round and absorb behaviour into cognition.

I think you're too hung up on whether "things" actually exist when imo, all that's necessary is models that can predict or describe things. I don't understand why you're against the cognitive things ive listed when theres evidence for these constructs that come from behavioural neuroscience let alone psychological tasks.

Also, maybe we aren't aiming to understand behaviour as such but cognition and the brain overall.

What you just described about operant conditioning is far too simplistic too explain much beyond simple learning. You're stuck in the past man. And no curiosity? Well exploration is a normal part of reinforcement learning models.

This guy is far closer than you are i think. >>9144566. Theres quite a few papers out there looking at operant conditioning as an inference process which i think makes more sense but unfortunately for you, relies on assumptions of things we can't see.

>>9144608
>Yes but
Your statement is structured like a rebuttal but I'm not seeing any disagreement with what I said.

Nature, or let's just come right out and say genetics, determines the probable range for first order development, which is then influenced by nurture (environment).

The "starting point", or "nature" portion, of each interaction between self and environment is the iterative result of the action before it. We also act on our environments as they act on us; in this way we are free even as we are constrained by genetics, reasons, and causes.

If you study and understand the mechanisms at work, there is nothing contradictory or even counter-intuitive about this.

>>9144633
I don't see what the problem with defining behavior as: "anything the organism does." Granted, this is a simplistic version of this definition, but the point should be clear that it doesn't need to apply concepts like cognition.

There are several problems when you assume that a construct like attention exists beyonds as a means to explain behavior, such as the fact that the construct takes away from the study of behavior (which is far more useful for society as a whole) in favor of studying this abstract nonexistent construct and that said construct doesn't actually provide a real explanation of behavior. As in, it leads to circular reasoning; why does the person not complete his work, he isn't paying attention. How do you know he isn't paying attention, he isn't completing his work.

Is it really too simplistic though? I already pointed out that many "advanced" concepts like self awareness or language aren't special or unique (see the documentary I posted) as they can be trained with animal as if it were ordinary behavior. Deprivation-Satiation is able to demonstrate why organisms are more likely to perform certain behaviors over others at a given time and successfully does this without the use of mentalistic explanations,, it doesn't matter if it seems too simplistic, because it actually has been demonstrated.

Curiosity has the same problem as attention, it is an abstract concept that doesn't actually explain the behavior beyond circular reasoning: Why did he go into the cave, he was curious, how do we know that he is curious, he went into the cave. We would call exploration of one's environment by the observable behaviors the organism performs as opposed to constructs within the organism.

>>9144566
>>9144633
The problem with studying the mind or even internal behaviors like thinking is that there is no way to actually falsify what is being studied, even if we had a "perfect mind reading device," it would be impossible for us to actually know it works because the person having their "mind read" could simply deny what was said and we would have no way to know if he was telling the truth.

>>9144650
>first order development?
>The "starting point", or "nature" portion, of each interaction between self and environment is the iterative result of the action before it?
free in a compatibilist sense.

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>>9142072
Gorillaz is 10/10
https://youtu.be/GUvbHkfhzYs

>>9144727
why can't cognition be "anything the organism does" given that i assume its you who proposed internal behaviour.

>doesn't actually provide a real explanation of behavior

then why are there psychological paradigms that seem to show empirical evidence for attention?

>As in, it leads to circular reasoning; why does the person not complete his work, he isn't paying attention. How do you know he isn't paying attention, he isn't completing his work.

This is just trivial and simplistic compared to the conversations you can have about attention from cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, neuroimaging/electrophysiology. Your silly example only applies in the sense of me and another person sitting in a room together, ignoring all the evidence out there.

That documentary didn't argue that self-awareness was trained in the pigeon...
Assuming that you can train complex constructs into animals using operant conditioning because they look like they are doing something is a fallacy without further evidence. It demonstrates something which can be explained far better by other means.

And again, what about the god damn brain?

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>>9136916
His crazy sexually perverted ideas are pure Pseudoscience.
For Freud every person is secretly a Mother Fucker (Oedipus complex).
& every kid is obsessed with oral, anal & phalic sex.
I don't understand why Freud get so respect from Normies to this day as the """greatest""" psychologist.

>>9144846
>why can't cognition be "anything the organism does" given that i assume its you who proposed internal behaviour.

That would just be thinking. And while there is a debate among behavior analysts among whether or not we even need the assumption of internal behaviors, both sides agree that thinking is behavior that is no different from external behavior beyond how difficult it is to observe and based off of that conclusion, thinking works like any other behavior as opposed to how cognitive psychologists suggest. It is arguably that cognitive behavioral therapy is really just applying behavioral laws to thinking.

>then why are there psychological paradigms that seem to show empirical evidence for attention?

There isn't, unless you consider attention as a constellation of different behaviors, in which case, attention is just the label given to behavior.

>This is just trivial and simplistic compared to the conversations you can have about attention from cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, neuroimaging/electrophysiology. Your silly example only applies in the sense of me and another person sitting in a room together, ignoring all the evidence out there.

Because my example demonstrates the problem with using hypothetical constructs to explain behavior, they don't actually provide an explanation for behavior and even more damning is that these constructs are reliant on psychologists deducing that they exist. This has several problems, a notable one being that it is impossible to actually prove such constructs exist (psychologists can only fail to not disprove them) and that it turns the field from a study of the observable to the study of hypothetical constructs. This problem and the fact that they are useless in explaining behavior show demonstrate just how little value they have for a science.

>That documentary didn't argue that self-awareness was trained in the pigeon..

You are right. It was arguing that self-awareness doesn't exist at all.

>>9144844
Clint Eastwood is about the only passable song they have.

>>9144846
>Assuming that you can train complex constructs into animals using operant conditioning because they look like they are doing something is a fallacy without further evidence. It demonstrates something which can be explained far better by other means.

I should really emphasize that the point of that documentary was to disprove the notion of self-awareness by showing how it can be trained behaviorally. The point was to show that you do not need the assumption of self-awareness to explain how an organism reacts to the mirror test.

>And again, what about the god damn brain?

The brain allows for behavior to occur, but it does not cause it. An easier way to understand this would be to compare it to one's hands. Your hands allow you to grab things, but you won't grab anything unless there is an environmental reason for you to do so (like grabbing food because you haven't eaten in days).

>>9144759
This is not the point... introspection wont tell us about the mind. people dont understand it.

>>9144874
> as opposed to how cognitive psychologists suggest

And how's that? desu your concept of internal behaviour just seems to make your behaviour the same as my cognition.

>attention is just the label given to behavior.
It can be a loose model that explains phenomena in psychological paradigms and imaging. Theres plenty of evidence. And to me, "label given to behaviour" is pretty much the same as label given to cognition.


>prove such constructs exist

You can't prove any theory definitively and literally almost every abstract theory in science is a hypothetical construct. They are often unobservable variables inferred through data. We don't need the models of our data to be "true" or "real", they just need to be predictive and explanatory. Tbh, if cognition doesn't provide explanations for behaviour (and your examples are too simplistic and faulty to actually show me this), then isn't explaining behaviour with behaviour worse? Cognition can just be used as latent variables, not just to explain behaviour, but to explain mental activity and inform our ideas about the brain itself. And we know we experience mental activity.

> disprove the notion of self-awareness
what if it was a flawed methodology in the first place, then you're not disproving self awareness.

>you won't grab anything unless there is an environmental reason for you to do so

but your behaviour won't be affected by the environment without a brain, and you have no reason to interact with the environment without a brain; the brain determines your drives and motivations. So the brain does cause behaviour.

Thats another thing, what about vision and hearing? vision isconsidered one of the most rigorous areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

>>9144989
>And how's that? desu your concept of internal behaviour just seems to make your behaviour the same as my cognition.

And that is where the debate comes in. Behavior analysts don't really use thinking in their practice beyond acknowledging it exists, it is just unimportant to what we are studying. Cognitive behavioral therapists tend to use it more to treat various disorders, but they act as if they are treating any other behavior. The point that behavior analysts agree on however is that thinking does not cause behavior.

>It can be a loose model that explains phenomena in psychological paradigms and imaging. Theres plenty of evidence. And to me, "label given to behaviour" is pretty much the same as label given to cognition.

There is a big difference between labeling someone performing a set of behaviors and someone labeling a set of cognition. The most notable being you can actually observe the set of behaviors, but must infer the existence of cognition from behavior.

Imaging doesn't actually prove the existence of constructs, just brain function and even then there is some debate to that.

>You can't prove any theory definitively and literally almost every abstract theory in science is a hypothetical construct.

This is where we get to the difference between intervening variables and hypothetical constructs. In most fields of science, they use intervening variables which are simply a way to quantify ones observations in an objective way (this usually involves math, but doesn't have to) so one can tell how exactly the intervening variable affects the phenomenon (gravity is a good example of this). Behavior analysts don't have problems with these. With hypothetical constructs, you can't actually do this and must rely on infering some construct exists and this is where problems start to occur, as there is no way to objectively measure your phenomenon.

Cont.

>>9144989
There is a reason why behavior analysts use single subject design over group design, and that is to avoid the problems of deduction; using single subject design allows for one's research to dictate the conclusions of a field rather than having to rely on deducing the existence of something by failing to disprove it enough times.

>and your examples are too simplistic and faulty to actually show me this

This is a clear problem with cognitive psychology as my examples are simply real life examples of behavior. What is the point of cognitive psychology if one cannot explain even the most simple of behavior with it?

>then isn't explaining behaviour with behaviour worse?

You mean explaining behavior by looking into the environment, because that is what behavior analysts assert causes behavior.

>Cognition can just be used as latent variables, not just to explain behaviour, but to explain mental activity and inform our ideas about the brain itself. And we know we experience mental activity.

Explain how.

>what if it was a flawed methodology in the first place, then you're not disproving self awareness.


How was it flawed? Skinners method seemed reasonable.

>but your behaviour won't be affected by the environment without a brain, and you have no reason to interact with the environment without a brain; the brain determines your drives and motivations. So the brain does cause behaviour.

Which just means that the brain allows for behavior to occur, but just having a brain isn't enough for said behaviors to occur. You must be in the right environment.

>>9145016
>>9145016

>Imaging doesn't actually prove the existence of constructs.

again, its not about definitively proving constructs, but imaging is another piece of evidence when it is used properly in a well designed experiment.

>The point that behavior analysts agree on however is that thinking does not cause behavior.

the view i subscribe to is that behaviour is a product of "reflex arcs" (not literally) that fulfil model predictions in the brain. Thinking as in e.g. talking in your head, doesn't cause behaviour, but behaviour is a product of the brain. Someone can describe it if they like as cognition.

>Behavior analysts don't have problems with these.

but you sacrifice the explanatory scope of your field. I think it should be accepted that inference is a natural part of existence itself. and the focus should be on prediction because we cannot verify if any theory is really true. And they don't have to be. Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't have to be literally true but its a useful model that generates predictions of data. Science has come along way beginning with having to make inferences with imperfect measurements and slowly gaining ground.

desu i think that attention, working memory, memory etc derive from phenomenological descriptions, but over time, neuroscience will start to have greater clarity on what is actually happening and clean up cognitive constructs. And to some extent its just begun to happen.

>>9145029
>deducing the existence of something by failing to disprove it enough times

this is not how people do science.

>my examples are simply real life examples of behavior

youre using attention in an improper context in examples that are so oversimplified they are simply not true and so dont apply.

>if one cannot explain even the most simple of behavior with it?

your examples have no context at all.

>Explain how.

mental phenomena clearly exists no? im saying the subject of psychology or neuroscience doesnt have to be behaviour. and for me, it isnt behaviour.

>How was it flawed? Skinners method seemed reasonable.

no the self awareness test being flawed.

>You must be in the right environment.

yes, but the environment is meaningless without a brain. you need a brain to see so you can react to the environment. Your brain builds the environment you perceive.

>>9144540
>Big Five
>based on logical and well-thought methods for cataloguing personality
Think again.

>>9145046
>again, its not about definitively proving constructs, but imaging is another piece of evidence when it is used properly in a well designed experiment.

If it isn't about constructs, then the only other option is what brain functions are responsible for allowing for what set of behaviors to occur and I don't see how that is beneficial to cognitive psychology.

>the view i subscribe to is that behaviour is a product of "reflex arcs" (not literally) that fulfil model predictions in the brain. Thinking as in e.g. talking in your head, doesn't cause behaviour, but behaviour is a product of the brain. Someone can describe it if they like as cognition.

But behavior can't occur without the proper environment for it to occur and it is significantly more useful to understand how the environment can shape behavior than how the brain allows it to happen (as its much easier for people to change one's environment when compared to changing one's brain.)

>but you sacrifice the explanatory scope of your field. I think it should be accepted that inference is a natural part of existence itself. and the focus should be on prediction because we cannot verify if any theory is really true.

But none of said subjects are important to understanding behavior. If you are able to fully explain why behavior occurs through environmental reasons (which behavior analysts are able to do so), then there is no need for one to study cognition.

>neuroscience will start to have greater clarity on what is actually happening and clean up cognitive constructs.

To be honest, I can't see the difference between modern day constructs and freudian era constructs beyond the methods used to justify them.

cont.

>>9145065
>this is not how people do science.
That is generally why group design is employed. You start with an overarching theory regarding a construct, such as working memory, then design a test around such an idea that involves people performing behaviors on a test, then from those results, deduce the existence of a construct assuming the results are statistically significant enough times.

>youre using attention in an improper context in examples that are so oversimplified they are simply not true and so dont apply.

How much detail do you want? Would "A teacher in a classroom of 5 students administered a math worksheet to the student in question, the student did not complete the math problem and instead spun his pencil on his desk for 5 minutes until the teacher told the student to "get to work," after which, the student started completing math problems." Be enough for you to explain behavior?

>mental phenomena clearly exists no? im saying the subject of psychology or neuroscience doesnt have to be behaviour. and for me, it isnt behaviour.

Thinking and emotions do, but not as either A. behaviors or B. the biproducts of behavior as opposed to being something that is able to explain behavior.

>no the self awareness test being flawed.

What would an accurate "self-awareness" test look like?

>yes, but the environment is meaningless without a brain....

And a brain is meaningless without an environment where behavior can occur (no behavior would occur if one's brain was never exposed to an environment, one's body is considered an environment as well). The difference here is that it is significantly more useful to study how changing the environment affects behavior than it is to study how changing one's brain can affect behavior for several reasons, such as ethical constraints, time it would take to perform a change, tools needed to change one's brain compared to changing an environment, etc.

>>9143654
>land myself in applied physics
>it's just lots of autists trying to make a meme engine
I could be revolutionizing something else.

>>9145097
>If it isn't about constructs,
proving constructs*

>cognitive psychology.
I view it all as an overarching science. No, cognitive psychology doesnt need to involve the brain but neuroscience informs it and vice versa. They are not separate to me. Cognitive psychology is emergent from the brain anyways.

>But behavior can't occur without the proper environment
I see the brain as coupled to the environment. The brain has expectations of what it expects in its environment and fulfils those predictions with behaviour arcs controlled by the brainstem.

>how the environment can shape behavior than how the brain allows it to happen

I dont see why people cant research and they obviously do this but i dont see how it can be a fundamental framework.

>none of said subjects are important to understanding behavior

not even the brain? Even in the strictest sense of behaviour, the brain can help you study motor learning, how people plan things, why people make certain decisions. I guarantee you, behaviour analysts can't fully explain behaviour through their methods and they dont look at things such as long term developmental processes and i bet they cant explain fully, deep complicated planning type behaviours; long behavioural sequences. Things such as electrophysiology can also give bigger scopes to what happens when people make random mistakes and things like that. Infact, there are more sophisticated methodologies of looking at how the environment shapes behaviour i.e dynamical systems theories.

>beyond the methods used to justify them.

im sorry, but thats literally the only way you can distinguish how good a construct is. Freud didnt use standardized, reliable, quantifiable instruments or tools. How else can you distinguish any scientific theory except for the predictions they make, the measurability or precision of those predictions. And i really dont think science has any other ways of prescribing how we make theories or what they should look like.

>>9144608
>nature determines things like how you learn from your environment via the genes attatched to neurotransmitters or synapses and that shit which mediates learning
We don't know that.

Nature gives you the tools. And the tools adjust to the environment in the way they can. In the case of humans, our development tools are so malleable that we may as well disregard most of nature's influence.

>>9145105
>Be enough for you to explain behavior?
No... *confused jackie chan face*. If you ask me, that kind of description is one behaviourists should look at eh?

>Thinking and emotions do,
Doesn't that just open the floodgates to other kinds of mentalistic things.

>And a brain is meaningless without an environment where behavior can occur.
so i guess the best thing to do would be to consider both rather than keeping with one or the other. I think my primary interest though is more concerned with the structure of the mind as opposed to the production of behaviour though obviously that is important and interesting as a topic.

>What would an accurate "self-awareness" test look like?

i dont know, its not an area im interested in particularly.

>significantly more useful to study how changing the environment affects behavior
I probably agree but i dont think that behaviourism is the way to do that, i think that effect has to involve the brain at somepoint and maybe other things such as development and i wander in what sense you mean this because i think about what a person can do to change their own behaviour as opposed to their "structural" environment. Also, remember that the environment effects the brain so it might be useful to look at the brain in that sense.

I also think that constructs in cognition can help here too, especially if you were to explain things to a client and acknowledge their own mental world.

Also, you seem to view psychology just as a way to help it and not as a science in itself to study how the mind or brain works which is more how i view it.

>ethical constraints, time it would take to perform a change, tools needed to change one's brain compared to changing an environment.

i dont see this as a reason for people to not do this ever. again, its important to study the environment etc. but i cant see it as a framework.

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>>9145144
>*confused jackie chan face*
Not him, but you could have just posted a confused jackie chan reaction image senpai.

>>9144822
The only meaningful sense, yes.

>>9145137
What do you mean, "we don't know that"?? Ofcourse it is. We learn through changes in synaptic plasticity... ofcourse that's going to have a genetic component.

>may as well disregard most of nature's influence.

If you can tell me "we don't know that." about what i said, i can literally do the same to you and more so. You have no basis for saying that. Theres no question the effect genes have on differences in behaviour between people. And even if we can change due to nurture's influence which is not in question, then nature will still influence those changes. And what do you mean by developmental tools? How can we disregard natures influence when you can see how heavily genetic mental illnesses like schizophrenia are. Nature is involved in everything you do and you can't quantify that input. You can quantify genetic influence into individual differences but not into causes of behaviour.

>>9145154
yeah but it was only in response to that one point.

>>9144727
I understand you about circular reasoning terms or terms that explain something without actually explaining it, but I think you should still be able to explain why concepts like attention are observed, even if they're just a illusion.

For example, attention, in my view, is merely the focus of the thoughts of a person at a given time, which depend on the internal motivations currently active on the person at that time. Ultimately, it is a concept of a real property that exists in the mind, but it mustn't be studied alone or isolated from the other brain functions. For that reason, it is indeed more reasonable to not account it as a lone concept at all.

>>9136916
?

>>9145179
t. brainlet

>>9145126
>proving constructs

I am not really seeing the difference here. Are you assuming that the construct exists before doing the brain imaging?

>I see the brain as coupled to the environment. The brain has expectations of what it expects in its environment and fulfils......

What exactly does "expects" or "expectations" mean in this context?

>I dont see why people cant.......

Because you don't need to have a huge understanding about the brain to understand how most typical behavior occurs. Behavior analysts are able to control behavior quite well just by controlling the environment.

>not even the brain?
Behavior analysts actually explain quite a few of those things quite well. Decision making is explained through concepts such as matching law and delay discounting (the latter has been used to create effective addiction treatments) and long behavioral sequences can be explained by analyzing the contingencies involved in those sequences (delay discounting is also relevant here).

The only thing listed that I don't see behavior analysts explaining is developmental processes, but that is closer to the realm of biology and even then, I do not see a significant problem with simply explaining development as differences in behavior between certain age groups as that is realistically what would be necessary in practice..

>im sorry, but thats literally the only way you can distinguish how good a construct is. Freud didnt use standardized, reliable, quantifiable instruments or tools. How else can you distinguish any scientific theory except for the predictions they make, the measurability or precision of those predictions. And i really dont think science has any other ways of prescribing how we make theories or what they should look like.

That is what I am saying, I don't see how current methods are able to adequately demonstrate the existence of hypothetical constructs usesd by cognitive psychology.

>>9145144
>No... *confused jackie chan face*. If you ask me, that kind of description is one behaviourists should look at eh?

Yes, a behavior analysts would realistically be able to explain why those behaviors occur in that example. What type of example would you be able to explain?

>Doesn't that just open the floodgates to other kinds of mentalistic things.

Potentially, this is again where the debate in behavior analysis becomes relevant. But even then, there is a big difference between asserting that thinking/emotions are just behaviors that are also affected by the environment and suggesting that those things (and other mentalistic) ideas are the causes of behavior. One doesn't suggest that all external and observable phenomenon in one's field is caused by an unobservable internal entity.

>so i guess the best thing to do would be to consider both rather than keeping with one or the...

Sure, but there comes a point when practicality comes into play. Being able to change behavior through the environment is significantly more useful than changing it through biology for the reasons I explained earlier, we will be able to address more societal problems through an environmental understanding of behavior than a brain based one.

>I also think that constructs in cognition can help here...

Most clients wouldn't buy the whole "there is no such thing as the mind" explanation, so we would have to explain things differently to them, but that alone shouldn't justify inaccurate constructs.

>Also, you seem...

I see it more as a study of behavior, relevant environmental factors, and physiology (so long as we keep physiology explaining the how question and not the why).

>i dont see this as a reason for people to not do this ever

Sure, there are some issues where understanding the brain is relevant, but for most behavior, it is far more practical to change one's environment in order to successful change behavior.

>>9145166
>>may as well disregard most of nature's influence.
Fine, I shouldn't have said that last bit. But what I mean is that our mind is very adaptable and is often able to undo caracteristics imposed by nature, such as being able to diminish hereditary anger issues through anger management. Our brain exceeds in being very very close to being a blank slate. I think I should also add that this plasticity of the human brain/mind is not constant and tends to stabilize just so people don't keep being that changeable through all their lives.

Let me rewrite my analogy.
Nature gives you the tools. And these tools helps you adjust to the environment in the way they can. In the case of humans, our development tools are so adaptative that they can work around unwanted hereditary predispositions if necessary.

>how heavily genetic mental illnesses like schizophrenia are
Hereditary physiological conditions is cheating.

>>9137063
We already have separated twin studies involving people raised in similar environments, and yes, they do tend to develop similar personality traits - no need to go all Mengele and start breaking babies to prove what we already know.

Though, oddly, twins are more apt to have departing personality types when raised together. Perhaps something about the constant urge to differentiate themselves and carve out their own identities, with the counterexample constantly by their side.

>>9145204
> Are you assuming that the construct exists before doing the brain imaging?
You're testing the fit of models, not the existence of real things.

>What exactly does "expects" or "expectations" mean in this?

Thermodynamically, the organism has to control its interaction with the environment in order to exist. Given the environment it exists in, there will be a distribution of sensory states it needs to restrict itself to in order to exist. These are what is expected.

>Behavior analysts are able to control behavior quite well just by controlling the environment.

i imagine just simple behaviour though. Everyday human behaviour is very hard.

>matching law and delay discounting
matching law seems too simple and delay discounting has had its best utility when studied in the context of cognition and neuroscience. Overall, the concepts I feel are too simple for studying extensive dynamic behaviour.
Tbh i don't see the benefit of behavioural analysis over other types of applied psychology in helping people. And i don't think a paradigm aimed at changing peoples behaviour (which you focus on) should be misconstrued as an overarching framework of how or why we behave. I havent even seen any behavioural analyst research from the last 15 years desu.

>existence of hypothetical constructs usesd by cognitive psychology.

i'm saying its not about existence.Working memory and attention are important as they are phenomenologically demonstrable and they are measured in tasks which can predict certain things but i don't literally believe in a cognitive module called attention and one called working memory. I don't believe thats how they are at all. Looking at the brain as a complex dynamic system, its easy to see that discrete constructs of attention and working memory are illusory. But they are still useful constructs for research and they still measure something happening in the brain which has tangible effects in our observable world and in our inner worlds.

>>9145234
I dont believe in genetic determinism because genes cant give you a baseline for your behaviour.

You can change environmentally definitely but the consequence of that change or the attempt to change is still moderated by genes. Genes are involved in everything.

I kind of think people are and they aren't enslaved, but not by either genes or environmental factors independently. Yes people do have choices etc, but statistically we do see relationships between things. If anything, most of all i think we're enslaved by our personalities.

Ha how are hereditary conditions cheating?

I disagree with blank slate but i see what you mean.

>>9145249
Given that environment and conditioning can eliminate even such fundamentally ingrained instincts as the will to survive, it seems there's no situation where genes can remain dominant, particularly if you target a behavior they are making more likely.

They do certainly skew you in one direction or the other, however, sometimes in frighteningly specific ways, such as for things like addiction and gambling. You aren't a complete slave to it though, as again, even the most core instincts can be overridden, and indeed, society depends on many of them being so - albeit, while encouraging others.

>>9145238
>You're testing the fit of models, not the existence of real things.

I am not seeing what that would demonstrate.

>Thermodynamically, the organism has to control its interaction with the environment

The problem here is that you are assuming that free will exists, which has the assumption that the organism is in control of its behavior and therefore there is something within the organism doing so as opposed to the environment causing the behavior (its easy to show that the environment causes behavior, just compare how people dress when it is hot outside as opposed to when it is cold.)

>i imagine just simple behaviour though. Everyday human behaviour is very hard.

It really isn't as hard as you suggest. Behavior analysts are able to do great work with the developmentally disabled, those addicted to drugs, those who have weight problems, and are even able to apply there skills to gambling and the creation of "addicting" video games.

>Tbh i don't see the benefit of behavioural analysis

Check the journal of applied behavior analysis or the journal of experimental analysis of behavior for plenty of examples of up to date research.

>matching law seems too simple and delay discounting has..

Delay discounting is applied to a multitude of different behavioral treatments relating to drug addiction, including methadone clinics and contingency management. Matching law can be used to explain why people are more likely to partake in certain behaviors over others (there have been experiments done that show that when given praise a set percentage of time in a discussion, they will engage with that person for said set amount of time).

>But they are still useful constructs...

But how are you able to tell what is a significant observation and what is a biproduct of the hypothetical construct. What exactly are you doing to deduce whether or not said constructs are worth while?

>>9145256
ingrained instinct are incredibly difficult to override still and can come back i imagine. This is the thing; its provable that things are changeable but its very difficult and often not practical in peoples everyday lives, and some things are alot harder than others. e.g. personality.


Weird as it sounds, i also think genes =/= instincts technically.

>>9145269

>I am not seeing what that would demonstrate.
its literally how science works. Prediction is the biggest thing. Prediction entails understanding.

>you are assuming that free will exists

No im not... this part of my chat actually just comes from physics. it applies to any system of a certain type, not just an organism. Ofcourse, the environment can lead to changes in the organisms behaviour, but this is dependent on the organism's model.

For instance...

>just compare how people dress when it is hot outside as opposed to when it is cold.

This is a great example of how an organism has an expectation of its environment to maintain homeostasis and so change their sensory input to fulfil that expectation i.e. putting on a coat/taking one off. Yes the environment led people to change their behaviour but this is conditional upon the organisms model of its environment/biological needs.

>journal of applied behavior analysis

ill have a look.

>What exactly are you doing to deduce whether or not said constructs are worth while?

just how much it explains or predicts i suppose. I think for psychology, alot of it is more so based on the reliability and validity of instruments.

>But how are you able to tell what is a significant observation and what is a biproduct of the hypothetical construct

im not exactly sure what you mean.

>>9145302
>its literally how science works. Prediction is the biggest thing. Prediction entails understanding.

I get that, I just don't get what you are trying to demonstrate with your experiment.

>This is a great example of how an organism has an expectation...

This explanation implies that free will exists by suggesting that expectations play a role in behavior.

To explain this without invoking such a notion you could say:

Premise A: This person has never heard of a weather station before.

When this person walks outside of their home that is 75 degrees (F) into the outside that is 25 degrees (F), they will go inside in order to escape from the cold and then place their coat on to avoid the cold while going outside.

Premise B: The person is familiar with a weather station.

Before going outside, this person will check the weather station as doing so in the past has allowed them to avoid excess cold/heat (and this behavior was likely modeled by a parent before this contingency was established) and contingencies have been placed with specific temperature regarding whether they are cold or hot (25 F has been paired with cold through behavior), so the person places a coat on in order to avoid the cold while going outside.

Neither of these explanations invoke any form of "agency" on the part of the organism, rather it explains the persons behavior through their environment (and past consequences in said environment).

>I think for psychology, alot of it is more so based on the reliability and validity of instruments.

Behavior analysts are trying to move away from this problem and towards having an understanding of behavior that works on its own.

>im not exactly sure what you mean.

I mean, how can you tell what observations are legitimately accurate in favor of your construct and which just happen to coincide with the assumptions of said construct.

>>9145326
>(25 F has been paired with cold through behavior)
Meant, through the verbal behavior of their family members; IE, when this person was outside when it was cold out, a parent said "it is 25 degrees out, it is cold."

>>9137022
>tfw when mouse
I'd say either that or the wageslave is the worst robot on there

>>9145326

>trying to demonstrate with your experiment.
whatever hypothesis you have..

>expectations play a role in behavior.

its actually expectation in a mathematical sense more so but even so, i don't see how expectation and free role are necessarily linked. I don't believe in it except in a compatibilistic way.

>move away from this problem and towards having an understanding of behavior that works on its own.

i dont think its a problem. I just see that it leaves behavioural analysis in a very narrow field. Its fine for a therapeutic paradigm maybe but it can't be an effective framework in which to describe our behaviour, brain and mental lives.

>how can you tell what observations ...

i dunno, make sure your hypotheses and design are decent in an experiment. draw from a broad range of different studies outside of the experiment. This problem you say probably happens a fair ammount in science. its unavoidable but how you make progress. science is built on mistakes.

This is significant i think; your conservativism in your views means that behavioural analysis has far less chance of approaching the status of something like physics in its explanatory power compared to other frameworks of brain and behaviour.

science is descriptive, psychology is teleological

is/ought problem

>>9145471
You just memed yourself out of the debate butthead

File: dexter.jpg (30KB, 500x350px) Image search: [Google]

30KB, 500x350px

>mfw a psychology thread managed to be the most fruitful on /sci/
We could have threads like this more often.

>>9145837
If this is what you consider fruit, I pity you.

>>9146065
This thread is overall a lot more fruitful than the typical psychology thread on /sci/.