Skepticism about social psychology

Most psychological research doesn't replicate, but social psych research has been hit particularly hard.

Societies change, which creates a temporal challenge for the field of social psychology.
Research in social psychology cannot be expected to stand the test of time because the findings are locked to the current society, which will change and evolve as time goes on. Nearly everything learned in social psych studies will be overturned within 30–100 years, just as the social research from decades past has largely been made irrelevant today. The most interesting social psych studies from the past would be completely unethical today (e.g. Milgram Shock Experiments) and some were fraudulent or otherwise deeply problematic during their own time (e.g. Stanford Prison Experiment). This social-temporal limitation also applies to social-location limitations, which render dubious the research that fails to take cross-cultural differences into account.

Social psychology can still be quite interesting.

Social psychology often involves building a career on current events, on what is hot and topical right now.
This could be quite interesting to the person doing the research or to a public that is curious about current affairs.

For example, I went to a social psychology talk where a PhD student had analyzed the songs people said they listened to after a romantic breakup. This PhD student used the song lyrics to sort the songs into categories based on attachment style. This PhD student won an award for this project. That might sound like an interesting project that aligns with a curious mind, even though it would not be scientifically valuable across time.

Why not?

Do you think this research would replicate?
In principle, this research about breakup songs cannot translate back in time since contemporary songs hadn't been written yet: a heartbroken person in the 1940s cannot listen to a song that came out in 2015. This research doesn't seem likely to translate forward in time, either: a heartbroken person in the 2140s almost certainly won't listen to songs that came out in 2015 when they go through a breakup. Indeed, people today don't listen to songs from the 1840s when they go through breakups. Thinking through the changes that society has been through and will go through, we can reason that this sort of social psych research is not destined to replicate in the future.

Enduring Findings

To my awareness, the enduring findings in social psychology can be summarized as follows:

• In general, groups tend to compete over resources, especially scarce resources, though this can be mitigated by cooperating on superordinate goals (e.g. disaster relief).
• In general, people tend to favour members of their in-group over members of out-groups.
• In general, people tend to express less explicit prejudice under conditions of cooperation for common goals in a supportive environment of their peers.
• In general, people tend to assume that other people act according to their personality (stable) rather than their situation or mood (transient), though this may be less applicable in collectivist cultures.
• Sometimes, having more strangers around can result in less individual helping behaviour (the Bystander Effect), though this doesn't necessarily apply in situations of unambiguous danger and does not apply to people that already have a relationship.

Social psychology has a dubious history

In undergrad, most of what I learned that went by the name "social psychology" turned out to be very flashy studies from decades long ago: the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram shock experiments, the Asch conformity research. Years after their publication, these studies turned out to be quite dubious. They were often either corrupt and unethical from the very beginning, deceptively misreported, or not replicated in any recent history.

Since transitioning to graduate school, a fair amount of the research I've seen that has been called "social psychology" has been sentiment-analysis of Twitter/X threads about trendy topics (e.g. American elections, environmental issues, COVID). Findings of this nature are not in principle scientifically generalizable cross-culturally or to future or past human societies. I'm certainly not saying that this is the only social psych research going on, just that it is the kind that I've seen the most.

If you are deeply interested in relatively transient social phenomena, especially emerging online phenomena, and are not particularly committed to long-term scientific discovery, social psychology might align with your interests. Social psychology allows you to collect data about trendy topics and current events. Personally, I can't help but conceptualize this aspect of social psychology as providing a journalistic or historiographical approach to knowledge and current affairs, edging itself closer to the humanities, which is a reasonable approach for those topics.

Personally, I found new insights about social structures by studying Game Theory, which is the precise mathematical study of strategic interactions. Game Theory can account for a number of social phenomena with precise mathematical models. If you are interested in generalizable social phenomena, check out Game Theory to see if it satisfies your curiosity.

Social psychology cannot account for individual differences

Human beings are not fungible: one cannot remove one person and slot in another, expecting the two to be equivalent.

Consider how the Milgram shock experiments are often misunderstood.
The ostensible conclusion drawn from these studies is that "X% of people would shock strangers to death if told to do so by a person in a lab-coat".

That isn't quite right, though. You cannot pick a person randomly and know what they will do. Each individual person doesn't have X% chance of being the kind of person that would shock someone to death.

There are sub-groups. Generally speaking:

• (i) some people refuse to administer any shocks,
• (ii) some people administer shocks until the (confederate) participant says to stop,
• (iii) some people keep going after the (confederate) participant says to stop. The people in group (iii) tended to persist in shocking all the way to the end.

This subtler understanding of sub-groups offers very different interpretations!
Instead of thinking that anyone might shock someone to death, we get a very different picture of three types of people:

• (i) people that have a "do no harm" principle,
• (ii) people that focus on consent,
• (iii) people that focus on authority.

To understand the mediators and moderators of this population further, we would need to separate them into sub-groups, not keep acting like they are all the same single group with an X% chance of being in group-(iii).

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