When Experiments Serve Little Purpose: Misguided Research in Mainstream Psychology

Theory & Psychology

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 183-194

  Wallach, Michael A ^a   Wallach, Lise ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

empirical test; epistemology of psychology; falsifiability; hypothesis testing; research presuppositions; tautology

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032374938     PISSN: 09593543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0959354398082005     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Batson, C.D.(1994). Looking back at The unresponsive bystander: Camelot or the Golden Age? Contemporary Psychology, 39, 941-943.
2. Brandtstadter, J.(1987). On certainty and universality in human development: Developmental psychology between apriorism and empiricism. In M. Chapman & R. A. Dixon (Eds.), Meaning and the growth of understanding: Wittgenstein's significance for developmental psychology (pp. 69-84). Berlin: Springer.
3. Clark, R.W.(1972). Einstein: The life and times. New York: Avon.
4. Crowned, D.I.P., & Marlow, D. (1964). The approval motive: Studies in evaluative dependence. New York: Wiley.
5. Fiedler, K.(1996). Explaining and simulating judgment biases as an aggregation phenomenon in probabilistic, multiple-cue environments. Psychological Review, 103, 193-214.
6. Flank, C., & Park, B. (1991). Increasing consensus in trait judgments through outcome dependency. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 453-467.
7. Gergen, K.J.(1986). Correspondence versus autonomy in the language of under-standing human action. In D. W. Finke & R. A. Shedder (Eds.), Met theory in social science: Pluralisms and subjectivities (pp. 136-162). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
8. Gergen, K.J.(1987). The language of psychological understanding. In H. J. Stem, TAB. Rogers, & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), The analysis of psychological theory (pp. 115-129). New York: Hemisphere.
9. Gergen, K.J.(1994 a). Toward transformation in social knowledge (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
10. Gergen, K.J.(1994 b). Realities and relationships: Soundings in social construction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11. Gigerenzer, G.(1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological Review, 103, 592-596.
12. Gigerenzer, G., & Murray, D.J. (1987). Cognition as intuitive statistics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
13. Gigerenzer, G., & Regier, T. (1996). How do we tell an association from a rule? Comment on Sloman (1996). Psychological Bulletin, 119, 23-26.
14. Hamilton, D.L., & Gifford, R.K. (1976). Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392-407.
15. Kahneman, D., Slavic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
16. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions. Psychological Review, 103, 582-591.
17. Latane, B., & Darley, J.M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn't he help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
18. Schaller, M., Crandall, C.S., Stangor, C., & Neuberg, S.L. (1995). ‘What kinds of social psychology experiments are of value to perform?’ Comment on Wallach and Wallach (1994). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 611-618.
19. Sloman, S.A.(1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3-22.
20. Smedslund, J.(1988). Psycho-logic. New York: Springer.
21. Smedslund, J.(1991). The pseudoempirical in psychology and the case for psychologic. Psychological Inquiry, 2, 325-338.
22. Smedslund, J.(1994). Non-empirical and empirical components in the hypotheses of five social psychological experiments. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 35, 1-15.
23. Smedslund, J.(1995). Psychologic: Common sense and the pseudoempirical. In J. A. Smith, R. Harré, & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), Rethinking psychology (pp. 196-206). London: Sage.
24. Wallach, L., & Wallach, M.A. (1994). Gergen versus the mainstream: Are hypo-theses in social psychology subject to empirical test? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 233-242.