Did psychologists believe themselves in the science that they professed?

Abstract

Bertrand Russel asked in a newspaper column (1932) of astrologers: “Do they believe themselves in the sciences that they profess?” This paper asks whether academic psychologists believed the science that they professed. The replication crisis—researchers do not obtain results comparable to the original when repeating that study—has, in the past decade, seriously challenged psychology's status as a science. Most of the social and behavioral sciences have been invalidated by the replication crisis, but I focus on psychology because of my personal involvement in this field. I draw on the work of Žižek and Zupančič on denial and disavowal to approach the question of what we believed. I will argue, contra Zupančič, that disavowal is not necessarily a phenomenon of mass individualism. As doctoral students, we learned to transgress scientific norms, and then to act as if this transgression had never happened. To enter the community of scientists, we had to disavow that psychology is not a science. After running enough studies—falling on our knees and praying—some of us came to believe that psychology is a science, whilst others held on to a more cynical position. Subjectively some of us believed, some did not, objectively we all believed. I also pursue the related questions of why we did what we did—why was it, for psychology as a field, necessary to break scientific norms and what enjoyment did we, as subjects, derive from what we were doing?