Do you want to believe that your car grill is determined by your personality or that lap dancers get better tips when they are ovulating? You probably like evolutionary psychology. Want to believe that surveys of psychology undergraduates at elite schools represent humanity, without the expense and risk of dealing with real people, who can be pretty sketchy? Social psychology is for you.(1)
Scientists don't think much of either and would prefer they stay in the humanities buildings, because evolutionary psychologists want to make everything about sex, while social psychologists claim there are no differences between sexes.
So it seems ironically fitting that in a journal named Archives of Scientific Psychology evolutionary psychologists used a survey to undermine social psychologists. What they found was that social psychologists are not doing a good job being science-y about behavior because they are overwhelmingly politically one-sided cultural relativists. No surprise there, academia creates an "icy chill" toward Republicans and like all good majorities, deny they do anything of the kind. Professor Ron McClamrock of SUNY-Albany phrased bluntly what many liberal academics think when he wrote, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.”(2)
The authors of the new paper, David Buss and William von Hippel, derive other concerns about social psychology from its political bias. Their belief that humans are a blank slate and culture makes us evil or good, for example, is "a view of human nature common among people on the political left"; social psychologists don't like evolutionary psychology or nature in general (also a view of the left); and they a desire to be persuasive rather than evidence-based, manifesting "with the maintenance of our prestige as scientists, and to form and maintain coalitions that compete with each other."
Well, a whole lot of academics fall prey to that. Gilles-Eric Seralini did not objectively create a methodology for his retracted paper claiming a non-toxic weedkiller somehow caused cancer in rats, he selected specific rats on purpose and threw out data that contradicted his conclusion, all to virtue signal for the activists in his circle.
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In 2013 I wrote about Geoffrey Miller, Diedrik Stapel, Satoshi Kanazawa, and Marc Hauser (above) and compared them to my oft-mentioned Four Horsemen of the Alternative in medicine, Drs. Oz, Weil, Chopra, and Gupta, while noting they would not kill psychology any more than the Drs. killed medicine, but I may have been wrong. Because the world needs medicine but doesn't need either of these psychology fields. These people could absolutely have killed their disciplines.
What would science really lose if Thanos snapped his fingers and both evolutionary psychologists and social psychologists disappeared? Nothing, there would just be some new offices opening up. But scientists wouldn't want to move in lest the same fate befall them. Scientists can be superstitious too.
NOTES:
(1) Want more?
Pretty people have more daughters
Does Selective Brain Damage Underpin Spirituality?
Atheists And Liberals More Intelligent, Says Atheist, Liberal Psychologist
Nail Is To Sex As Hammer Is To Evolutionary Psychology
Female Shopping Is Evolution And The Mall Is The Lab
People Assign Personalities To Cars, Says Study
(2) He is, of course, a philosopher, which has its own academic partisanship problem. Not that you were unable to gather that from his quote.
