Psychology: "Hijacked, insane, and dysfunctional"

In One Cosmos, Gagdad Bob writes,

...Think of how much more we know about the cosmos now than 300 years ago, at the beginning of the scientific revolution. But think of how much larger the cosmos has grown with the knowledge: 300 years ago the size was manageable, which is to say, imaginable. But now its vastness is quite literally unimaginable. It's hard to imagine a single galaxy, let alone 200 billion. How about 2 trillion? Never mind.

It's no different with the mind: if we're honest -- or mature -- the more we know, the less we know. I earned my PhD back in 1988, since which time my ignorance has only increased, as it should. But "leftist psychology" is no less insane and dysfunctional than leftist economics, and the left has increasingly hijacked the discipline of psychology over the past thirty years.

Read more here.

Psychology? Science?

Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time.

Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.

It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times.

Read more here.

Understanding Evil

Kevin Simpson and Electra Draper write a piece today in the Denver Post entitled Amid Tragedy, A Continuing Quest to Understand. Their focus is trying to understand why school shooters, theater shooters, and other acts of evil keep happening. They quote a neuroscientist named Sam Harris, who said,

"Free will is an illusion," Harris says. "None of us choose our brains. And we are not the authors of our thoughts or actions."

Of course we do not choose our brains, but if there is no such thing as free will, then there is no such thing as personal responsibility!

Is our biology our destiny? No, says Anthony Raine, a University of Pennsylvania criminology professor, who has written a book entitled "The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime." The Post writers quote Raine as advocating for things like better nutrition and meditation for violent offenders. Oh yeah, give them a banana and an apple and some quiet time. That'll cure evil!

Is evil something that is within all of us? The authors interviewed University of Virginia religious studies professor Charles Mathewes, who researches and lectures on evil and sin.

Do we choose evil, or does it choose us?

"If we start identifying people as evil, we better not do that in a way that leaves any of us out of it," Mathewes says. "Evil is not an alien force that comes from Mars. It's alarmingly intimate to us. Most evil is mundane, even banal. It's selfishness, lying and letting evil happen all around us. None of us recognizes our own savagery."

Simpson and Draper conclude their article by quoting Stephen Diamond, a forensic psychologist who writes a blog called "Evil Deeds" for Psychology Today.

"With Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis, everything became reduced to psychology for awhile," Diamond says. "And so this pendulum swing is a corrective, if you will, a counteraction to that, a recognition of the biological reality of behavior and mental illness.

"But the truth of the matter is somewhere in between."