Is Psychology Based on a Methodological Error?

Abstract

It is believed a proven fact that variables in social and personality psychology match to normal distribution with its single peak. Multiple peaks are explained by independent variables. However, after a comprehensive data analysis of more than 8.000 patients and on the basis of a bio-psycho-social model with 27 scales, we arrived at the conclusion that normal distribution and the psychometric error theory cannot withstand critical analysis in large samples. Beyond the "truth" that is proved by distribution-dependent statistical inferences, there exists another "truth" that is denied by the empirical doctrine. This "truth" is influenced by compensatory belief systems and explains paradoxes in quality of life research. We hypothesize that items, referred to life risks are micro-stressors, triggering self-regulatory processes as a humanly inherent response, deeply anchored in human evolution. Especially when exposed to threatening experiences, self-focused attention generates amplified multimodal distributions and subverts the methodological premises by an ambivalence-bias between thrill and threat, hopes and fears, pleasure and pain, success and failure, etc. In this article we want to focus attention to the incommensurability between test theoretical axioms and the way people usually respond to self-focused items. We discuss basic distribution patterns and approach to an evolutionary theory of fluctuation of validity.

“Der Weisheits letzter Schluss”? Wisdom’s Last Conclusion?

“…2 "Anomalies" are inherent to each individual and the individual's subjectivity is real, as Schwarz (2009) points out. This might even lead to contradictions within the same person's data set, but even those contradictions might make sense to the individual (see Schwarz 2009)-which we, as psychologists, are trying to understand. The "fluctuation of validity" within Schwarz' model makes room for this ambiguity, not saying that the model itself is "der Weisheit letzter Schluss."…”

“…Immaturity is probably not as much the problem as the danger of getting stuck in a certain field or theoretical frame. Schwarz (2009) says that psychology today is characterized by fragmentations. Researchers are confronted with an "ever widening research enterprise" (Valsiner 2009, p.1) within these fragments.…”

“…James 1890), "What is our view of the person?" Courses in "The Philosophy of Psychology" might be a nice addition to the bachelor's and master's curricula for this matter, which Schwarz (2009) also hints at ("psychological areas have a special responsibility to support progress in the light of philosophy of science", p. 22). If through these courses/encounters raptures occur, the way for interdisciplinary discussions to arrive at new and more general theories might be paved-even if those more general theories will not be the "Weisheits letzter Schluss" 7 and we might wish that we could reduce them to the number 3.…”

“…The classical framework rather suggests-if mismatches occur-that the data is flawed, that subjects are unwilling or uncooperative, or that the instruments do not meet certain standards so that the anomalies cannot be real or meaningful. Even Schwarz (2009) himself had to reach a dead end street, before he ventured out into a new, unexpected, and more promising direction. Do psychologists (and researchers especially) always need to end up in a dead end or to personally experience "rupture-transitions" 1 (cp.…”

Shifting Loyalties: Reconsidering Psychology’s Subject Matter

“…Hence, much of what Schwarz has illuminated-in conjunction with scientific conventionalism-is a rather deficient view of psychology's subject matter: the human being. According to Schwarz (2009), part of the problem facing psychology is bound to the taken-for-granted axiom of empiricism, "because empiricism is based on the belief that individual's subjectivity is nothing real, scientific psychology excludes it, and thus shrinks itself to an ideological 'ism'" (pg. 6).…”