I would definitely see the “why” behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught
That's where modern methods come in, we can measure indirectly these abstract concepts if done correctly. (they def dont teach this in undergrad but I was in a psych stats and methods research lab that lowkey taught me stuff much higher than I should have) In my opinion if we want to understand psychoanalytic better we need to not only formulate interactions a-priori (very important!!) but test those concepts with modern stats.
I fear making inferences without bringing it down to something more concrete and disprovable, its hard to sift through what is real and what is crack pot. I dont mean this derogatorily but its very easy to be persuasive and become convinced your theory is right as you keep justifying niche reasons why it acted the way you wanted. This has real consequences when either in practice you are harming/depriving a client of a therapeutic model that could be better (not any particular psychoanalytic necessarily being inferior but the fear is still there) , or that we make assumptions about how the world works due to a wrong theory giving us a less true perspective of the world. I have less of these fears with empirical analysis because I am using the same tools to dissect and compare models of the world between each other concretely. I can show it performs X better or acts in X way definitively, or at least its easier to deconstruct and tear down. (I'm a sucker for popper falsification if you couldn't tell.) I guess its my biggest fear is moving farther and farther away from material reality and truth with it.
For example on how abstract concepts can be measured maybe this will help:
Structural equation modeling and other latent variable analysis allows us to measure abstract concepts. They do this for many constructs and see how one abstract concept correlates, is co dependent with, or even soft causality. Think of it like a web diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling#/media/File:Example_Structural_equation_model.svg here is a link to the wikipedia diagram (sorry for my laziness!) basically the squares in this diagram are concrete measured "observed" values. This can be a scale which we can establish to be reputable, it can be number of times done X etc. you feed multiple things that make up this abstract idea into it to sort of create a gestalt summation of it (thats my way of describing it but its not exactly theoretically accurate ofc). This is the circle the "latent variable" or abstract or immeasurable and we can make an approximation of it to be used to show what relationship it should have in theory. and we can use what we learn from it to inform future theoretical models and adjusting it.
boring stats jargon aside, think of modern stats methods as putting a blanket over a bastketball. you can see the shape and you can touch the outside of it and poke it and gain lots of info about it. just because I cant directly observe it in its entirety I can still gain insight indirectly. Thats basically what this does.
Sorry to rant on this but "its abstract and immeasurable" is becoming less and less of an excuse for psychology with the power of modern methods and stats. This is empowering to me because we can tread previously taboo waters. So yes I dismiss alot of claims of psychoanalysis sometimes in an academic sense if it was used to inform a study I can actually find a way to disprove that sounds awesome to me!
The shift in focus to teach undergrads to understand the importance of empiricism imo is probably because previously untouchable concepts are becoming measurable. and in turn people needing to use these very sensitive stats and methods carefully. tbh most psychologists have very poor stats and methods undertanding and it shows in the replication crisis. They need to make a theory and set what tests they will do before hand and just show the results, but there is alot of fuckery that happens in between adjusting models until its nice and tidy. I hate this so much. Give me your messy study because thats reality not your skewed narrative! you know? thats why transparency and incentive structues and hammering in the importance of doing your methods correctly!!!
Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don’t want to share info on here, but what are your interests?
I have a very wide interest pool. I have a psychology bachelors but I want to get my PHD eventually. I didn't get into a program 2 years ago, it hit me kind of hard and I got discouraged, and got lowkey in a slump and smoked weed daily for 2 years lmao. I am planning on getting out of my rut this year though and trying to get back into academia. i appreciate this conversation its very stimulating for me as I have been out of practice haha.
I guess I want to measure models of mental health applications but I want it extremely grounded to reality and I would like to operationalize abstract concepts for use in in therapy or other treatment. I would also like to understand the mechanisms better but again I want to be sure its REAL not just fitting a narrative someone theorized. People spend their lives working on their theories leaving them to often nudge the results in their direction. I want to make sure the work I do is academically honest and is actually useful practically. I just love learning and want to know truth with a capital T as much as I can. I dont have a particular field or sub group,
I have worked with data from middle school substance use surveys to project individual variations and their trajectories (mixed effects modeling) so basically I wanna know if you started at "high use" in middle school do you stay or increase and when do these patterns stabilize. It was my first study i was able to investigate so its not theoretically rich necessarily because it was more a sort of playground for me to learn how to format, use, and apply these techniques. My professor was NB and so our lab also had a secondary focus of gender identity research, so while I did not work on those projects those issues and finding ways to operationalize non binary identities are close to my heart (lots of information is lost with a binary while continuous scale variables are much more fruitful!!!).
The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis’ history, I know there’s been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there’s something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I’ve come across and I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah that was just an example of theory not reigned in and applied despite not being "real". Thats my fear is harm will come to people or incorrect assumptions will be gained from a lack of grounding it to observations.
I will admit my theory is really weak, I love to learn about it but I treat it more as hobby. I think if those who are great at theory linked up with devoted methods people alot of great work could be done.
anyway now you get my anxieties with alot of psychoanalytics , and I defintely came in very hot at first haha.
As for the chomsky stuff I find it fascinating I learned about the LAD and how he destroyed skinner, but it was very skimmed/surface level. Honestly psych undergrad is day care sometimes. It doesn't scratch the surface of alot of these theories.
I just want to say that you are extremely incredibly well read and I respect the effort you put in, I will defintely be referencing this post when I need a theory fix and want to look into psychoanalytics more.
Thanks for your time, if you want to link up in discord or something DM me!
That's where modern methods come in, we can measure indirectly these abstract concepts if done correctly. (they def dont teach this in undergrad but I was in a psych stats and methods research lab that lowkey taught me stuff much higher than I should have) In my opinion if we want to understand psychoanalytic better we need to not only formulate interactions a-priori (very important!!) but test those concepts with modern stats.
I fear making inferences without bringing it down to something more concrete and disprovable, its hard to sift through what is real and what is crack pot. I dont mean this derogatorily but its very easy to be persuasive and become convinced your theory is right as you keep justifying niche reasons why it acted the way you wanted. This has real consequences when either in practice you are harming/depriving a client of a therapeutic model that could be better (not any particular psychoanalytic necessarily being inferior but the fear is still there) , or that we make assumptions about how the world works due to a wrong theory giving us a less true perspective of the world. I have less of these fears with empirical analysis because I am using the same tools to dissect and compare models of the world between each other concretely. I can show it performs X better or acts in X way definitively, or at least its easier to deconstruct and tear down. (I'm a sucker for popper falsification if you couldn't tell.) I guess its my biggest fear is moving farther and farther away from material reality and truth with it.
For example on how abstract concepts can be measured maybe this will help:
Structural equation modeling and other latent variable analysis allows us to measure abstract concepts. They do this for many constructs and see how one abstract concept correlates, is co dependent with, or even soft causality. Think of it like a web diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling#/media/File:Example_Structural_equation_model.svg here is a link to the wikipedia diagram (sorry for my laziness!) basically the squares in this diagram are concrete measured "observed" values. This can be a scale which we can establish to be reputable, it can be number of times done X etc. you feed multiple things that make up this abstract idea into it to sort of create a gestalt summation of it (thats my way of describing it but its not exactly theoretically accurate ofc). This is the circle the "latent variable" or abstract or immeasurable and we can make an approximation of it to be used to show what relationship it should have in theory. and we can use what we learn from it to inform future theoretical models and adjusting it.
boring stats jargon aside, think of modern stats methods as putting a blanket over a bastketball. you can see the shape and you can touch the outside of it and poke it and gain lots of info about it. just because I cant directly observe it in its entirety I can still gain insight indirectly. Thats basically what this does.
Sorry to rant on this but "its abstract and immeasurable" is becoming less and less of an excuse for psychology with the power of modern methods and stats. This is empowering to me because we can tread previously taboo waters. So yes I dismiss alot of claims of psychoanalysis sometimes in an academic sense if it was used to inform a study I can actually find a way to disprove that sounds awesome to me!
The shift in focus to teach undergrads to understand the importance of empiricism imo is probably because previously untouchable concepts are becoming measurable. and in turn people needing to use these very sensitive stats and methods carefully. tbh most psychologists have very poor stats and methods undertanding and it shows in the replication crisis. They need to make a theory and set what tests they will do before hand and just show the results, but there is alot of fuckery that happens in between adjusting models until its nice and tidy. I hate this so much. Give me your messy study because thats reality not your skewed narrative! you know? thats why transparency and incentive structues and hammering in the importance of doing your methods correctly!!!
I have a very wide interest pool. I have a psychology bachelors but I want to get my PHD eventually. I didn't get into a program 2 years ago, it hit me kind of hard and I got discouraged, and got lowkey in a slump and smoked weed daily for 2 years lmao. I am planning on getting out of my rut this year though and trying to get back into academia. i appreciate this conversation its very stimulating for me as I have been out of practice haha.
I guess I want to measure models of mental health applications but I want it extremely grounded to reality and I would like to operationalize abstract concepts for use in in therapy or other treatment. I would also like to understand the mechanisms better but again I want to be sure its REAL not just fitting a narrative someone theorized. People spend their lives working on their theories leaving them to often nudge the results in their direction. I want to make sure the work I do is academically honest and is actually useful practically. I just love learning and want to know truth with a capital T as much as I can. I dont have a particular field or sub group,
I have worked with data from middle school substance use surveys to project individual variations and their trajectories (mixed effects modeling) so basically I wanna know if you started at "high use" in middle school do you stay or increase and when do these patterns stabilize. It was my first study i was able to investigate so its not theoretically rich necessarily because it was more a sort of playground for me to learn how to format, use, and apply these techniques. My professor was NB and so our lab also had a secondary focus of gender identity research, so while I did not work on those projects those issues and finding ways to operationalize non binary identities are close to my heart (lots of information is lost with a binary while continuous scale variables are much more fruitful!!!).
Yeah that was just an example of theory not reigned in and applied despite not being "real". Thats my fear is harm will come to people or incorrect assumptions will be gained from a lack of grounding it to observations.
I will admit my theory is really weak, I love to learn about it but I treat it more as hobby. I think if those who are great at theory linked up with devoted methods people alot of great work could be done.
anyway now you get my anxieties with alot of psychoanalytics , and I defintely came in very hot at first haha.
As for the chomsky stuff I find it fascinating I learned about the LAD and how he destroyed skinner, but it was very skimmed/surface level. Honestly psych undergrad is day care sometimes. It doesn't scratch the surface of alot of these theories.
I just want to say that you are extremely incredibly well read and I respect the effort you put in, I will defintely be referencing this post when I need a theory fix and want to look into psychoanalytics more.
Thanks for your time, if you want to link up in discord or something DM me!
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