The View of Russian Psychology Students on Whether Psychology is a Science

The Psychology as Science Scale (Friedrich, 1996) was administered to 525 psychology students from nine Russian universities to assess their beliefs about the nature of the discipline. About half of students (49.6%) generally agreed that psychology may be called a scientific discipline. Specifically, 71. 5% of the students agreed that psychology is a natural science, similar to biology, chemistry, and physics, 39. 9% of students agreed that psychological research is important and training in psychological methodology is necessary, and 43.1% of students agreed that human behavior is highly predictable. Students who took three methodology courses shared significantly stronger beliefs in the need for psychological research and the importance of training in methodology compared to students who did not take any methodology courses. Furthermore, students with a specialist degree had significantly stronger beliefs that psychology is a science compared to students who have just finished school. In terms of the effect of students’ career aspirations, students who wanted to be academic psychologists and clinicians had significantly stronger beliefs that psychology is a science compared to students who did not have clarity about their future careers. Regardless of the study limitations, these findings have potential implications for Russian psychology instructors.

Multiculturalism as a new ethical challenge for polish school and academic psychologists

The article allows to get to know the precise guidelines regarding the ethics in two changing areas in the work of school psychologists: in scientific research and in school practice. These areas undergo cyclic changes, not only due to the development of humanities and numerous reforms of educational system, but also because of an increasing multiculturalism of Polish society. It can be stated, that the changes in schooling system reflect the most current social problems, therefore they deserve a special distinction from other areas of psychological practice. In the following article we describe the newest guidelines of the European Commission regarding the ethics of psychological research, we also open a discussion about chosen ethical dilemmas, which can be encountered by a school psychologist in an era of increasing multiculturalism.

Subjectivity Is No Object: Can Subject-Object Dualism Be Reconciled Through Phenomenology?

Transpersonal psychology has at times critiqued the broader psychology field for perpetrating a somewhat arbitrary Cartesian subject-object divide. Some phenomenologists claim that reframing this purported divide as an experienced phenomenon can defuse its philosophical impact. If subjective experiences are viewed as continuous with the lifeworld out of which objective phenomena are abstracted, the divide between these is revealed as a somewhat arbitrary, if useful, construction. This, in turn, challenges psychology to engage with subjective phenomena in a more substantive way. In this paper based on excerpts from a protracted email conversation held on the American Psychological Association’s Humanistic Psychology (Division 32) listserv, two academic psychologists with transpersonal interests explore this extraordinary claim of phenomenology, one being a proponent and the other being a skeptic of the claim. Two other academic psychologists with transpersonal interests who participated in this dialogue comment on its relevance for transpersonal psychology. The conversation focuses on the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger, and emphasizes how phenomenology might reconcile the subject-object divide through exploring intentionality, the meaning of noetic/noema, and thinking itself, while the discussion serves as an example of an adversarial collaboration in which disagreeing parties seek deeper understanding through dialogue.

Statistical Rituals: The Replication Delusion and How We Got There

The “replication crisis” has been attributed to misguided external incentives gamed by researchers (the strategic-game hypothesis). Here, I want to draw attention to a complementary internal factor, namely, researchers’ widespread faith in a statistical ritual and associated delusions (the statistical-ritual hypothesis). The “null ritual,” unknown in statistics proper, eliminates judgment precisely at points where statistical theories demand it. The crucial delusion is that the p value specifies the probability of a successful replication (i.e., 1 – p), which makes replication studies appear to be superfluous. A review of studies with 839 academic psychologists and 991 students shows that the replication delusion existed among 20% of the faculty teaching statistics in psychology, 39% of the professors and lecturers, and 66% of the students. Two further beliefs, the illusion of certainty (e.g., that statistical significance proves that an effect exists) and Bayesian wishful thinking (e.g., that the probability of the alternative hypothesis being true is 1 – p), also make successful replication appear to be certain or almost certain, respectively. In every study reviewed, the majority of researchers (56%–97%) exhibited one or more of these delusions. Psychology departments need to begin teaching statistical thinking, not rituals, and journal editors should no longer accept manuscripts that report results as “significant” or “not significant.”

Efficacy and Collective (Dis)satisfaction

There is currently extensive debate in psychological science about how to improve the field’s replicability (e.g. Kruglanski, Chernikova, & Jasko, 2017; Lindsay, 2015). In this paper I explore the meta-scientific question of who is pushing for changes to the way research is done, and why. I use the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA; Van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008) to derive (pre-registered) hypotheses about how researchers’ identity as academic psychologists, their efficacy, and their sense of satisfaction relate to their willingness to engage in reformative research practices. Results show that efficacy and collective satisfaction are consistent predictors of collective action, participating in direct replication projects, and pre-registering one’s studies. Practical implications of these findings are discussed.