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Social justice talks beside overdoses
The conference
The occasion was the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, held in the middle of the Tenderloin district. Scholars scurried past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is literally the main finding of one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.
A growing doubt
One attendee had assumed the answer to every dilemma was more research, and that eventually all the experiments being presented inside the hotel would solve the problems outside it. Eating canapes in a ballroom mere feet from so much misery, that attendee began to wonder whether anyone was trying to make progress or whether everyone was just publishing papers.
The wrong kind of knowledge
The barrier between us and a better world is still a lack of knowledge, just not that knowledge. Another thousand studies on stereotype threat, ego depletion, and growth mindset will not cure the human suffering visible on the streets of San Francisco, whatever wonders they do for a CV. These days, on the rare occasions that attendee enters the conference hotel, the name badge carries no academic affiliation and simply reads guest.
Why did psychology's famous findings fail to replicate?
In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration reported in Science that it had repeated 100 published psychology studies. About 36 percent of the repeats produced a statistically significant result, compared with 97 percent of the originals. A 2016 project in Perspectives on Psychological Science had 23 labs run the same ego depletion experiment and found an effect close to zero. Small samples and the pressure to publish positive results are the explanations researchers most often give.
How did Housing First change homelessness policy?
Sam Tsemberis founded Pathways to Housing in New York in 1992 on the idea of giving people homes without first requiring treatment or sobriety. A Canadian trial called At Home/Chez Soi, run by the Mental Health Commission of Canada in five cities beginning in 2009, enrolled more than 2,000 participants. It reported that people placed in housing without preconditions spent more time stably housed than people receiving usual services. Finland adopted a national Housing First strategy in 2008, and its long-term homelessness fell in the years after.
Why does academia reward papers over solutions?
Hiring and tenure committees need a countable measure, and published papers, especially in prestigious journals, are the measure nearest to hand. Sociologist Logan Wilson described this pressure to publish in his 1942 book The Academic Man, and the phrase "publish or perish" is traced to that era. Physicist Jorge Hirsch proposed the h-index in a 2005 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a single number built from a scholar's papers and the citations they receive.
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