In thinking more about that bogus study I wrote about Saturday, the one that claims to show that Christianity makes children more selfish and "punitive", the whole business of the "Dictator Game" as a means of discerning such things is a good window into the absurdity of the social and behavioral sciences and, often, their complete dishonesty. Also, I will again say that I can discern nothing in their "game" which even justifies calling it that and I would guess the children required to play it could see no point in it.
We are supposed to take on faith that this or any other artificial "game" is supposed to be a window into the character of children in their real lives. Well, the first thing to consider is that this "game" isn't something the children invented or chose to play, they played a game invented by the researchers at the request of the researcher. If a researcher had asked me to play a game that involved stickers after about the age of eleven, I think I'd have rolled my eyes and felt insulted. It's nothing like anything I'd have done in real life, in real life I generally hated games, even the ones I was good at bored me. I can imagine in any sample of 1,700 kids a significant percentage of them would have never chosen to play the researchers' game. I'd like to know if any of them adopted such a "game" to continue playing it. So the game, itself is not guaranteed to be anything revealing the real life choices that these children would make. If that's true there is no reason to believe the game would show anything else about how the children would act in real life.
Games, even the ones children choose to play, are artificial structures, they are activities that are unlike real life, having different rules within which actions are permissible. Real life choices to give or hoard aren't governed by rules like that in any context a child is likely to encounter. People do things in the context of playing a game they'd never do in real life. I've known the most charitable person in real life turn into a ruthless and heartless monopolist while playing Monopoly. While a person already in possession of pathological tendencies can bring those to a violent video game and even find encouragement in them, you wouldn't be hard pressed to find the person who might kill dozens,hundreds or thousands of make believe beings in a video game would be completely reluctant to kill even a mouse in real life.
The conventional assertion of the behavioral sciences that these games as psychological experiments reliably show something about the real lives and real minds of people in real life is nothing anyone has to take seriously.
The success with which they do that would, I am certain, in many cases published as science, be everything from absolutely none to not anything reliably determinable and I doubt it's ever been honestly and rigorously studied. Rigor and honesty are not the major characteristics of those fields.
I would like to know how and what results have ever been gained from any attempt to relate the results of this kind of scientific procedure and the real lives of the people who participated in the experiments. I'm willing to say that my guess would be a rigorous attempt to do so would not achieve anything above a null result.
Update: So what?
Well, yeah, I know that looking rigorously might, if my suspicions are correct, invalidate a huge amount of psychology and related fields. So what? If those suspicions are correct then the assertion that their experiments show something about reality in real life are as invalid as they would have been if those flaws had been taken seriously in review and their studies had been rejected.
Or isn't that supposed to be how science really works, the claim that science as an oracle of reality makes?
Freud's emphasis on the importance of memory and childhood was based largely on Wordsworth's poetry, and Wordsworth in turn got his ideas from Locke's epistemology.
ReplyDeleteOf course, no scientist thinks of Freud as anything but historical baggage, and yet in the popular mind the "id" and the "ego" and even the "unconscious" continue to be words with meaning, even if they aren't strictly Freudian meanings. But hey, close enough is good enough, right?
Wittgenstein shredded psychology and psychiatry, and most of it is based on ideas about "mind" and "psyche", or reflects the power of some drug which provides miraculous cures, until it doesn't; or theories which work in theory, but seldom that well in concreto. There is still some value to approaching mental health from a scientific perspective, but the idea that such an approach reveals "truth" is a seriously flawed one.
Just now PBS and NPR are rich with claims about the human brain (neurons firing! Perceptions perceived by bio-chemistry! Thought as an electrical discharge between synapses!) which is on the cutting edge of....50 years ago. Seriously, I remember taking classes in college, and friends in other colleges, being told all this stuff then, and nothing seems to have advanced. The very concept of "mind" employed by the guy on PBS is no further along than Hume's speculations. the very idea of perception doesn't begin to take account of Kant. It's laughably bad, and yet it's science! In the first show he claimed the world is colorless and soundless and what we perceive is an illusion. Which might be interesting from a Buddhist perspective, or even a strict Platonist argument, but what it had to do with how the brain works was never really explained, except apparently perception is what happens between synapses and therefore isn't real. Oh, and who you are can change in an instant, and since you are not physically the person you were when you were seven, you aren't even the same person anymore!!!!!!!!
I mean, honestly, its like listening to 8th graders tell each other scary tales of adulthood.