Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine

People act like the replication crisis has discredited psychology, that the field is now widely agreed to be a sham, that it can be uncontroversially held up as an example of science gone wrong. These statements are often made in the broadest possible terms:This misunderstands the extent of the problem. The replication crisis primarily affected the sub-field of social psychology, and most centrally the sub-sub-field of social priming research - the study of how seemingly trivial interventions can have outsized effects on behavior.Here’s the table of contents of an online Intro Psychology textbook (OpenStax Psychology, 2nd edition):Social psychology - which includes social priming, power poses, nudges, stereotype threat, the Stanford Prison experiment, the Wansink portion size study, and everything else you love to hate - is in chapter 12 of 16. The other fifteen chapters are comparatively innocuous. Here are examples of the subheadings you get when you expand some of the chapters…