Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T03:08:30.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is generalization decay a fundamental law of psychology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2024

David R. Mandel Open the ORCID record for David R. Mandel [Opens in a new window]
David R. Mandel*
Affiliation:
Defence Research and Development Canada and York University, Toronto, ON, Canada drmandel66@gmail.com https://sites.google.com/site/themandelian/home
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Generalizations strengthen in traditional sciences, but in psychology (and social and behavioral sciences, more generally) they decay. This is usually viewed as a problem requiring solution. It could be viewed instead as a law-like phenomenon. Generalization decay cannot be squelched because human behavior is metastable and all behavioral data collected thus far have resulted from a thin sliver of human time.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e54
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atari, M., & Henrich, J. (2023). Historical psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(2), 176–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221149737CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, D. T. (1957). Factors relevant to the validity of experiments in social settings. Psychological Bulletin, 54(4), 297–312. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040950CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cortês, M., Kauffman, S. A., Liddle, A. R., & Smolin, L. (2022). Biocosmology: Biology from a cosmological perspective. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.09379CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronbach, L. J. (1957). The two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist, 12(11), 671–684.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronbach, L. J. (1975). Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist, 30(2), 116–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Grey, A. D. N. J. (2004). Escape velocity: Why the prospect of extreme human life extension matters now. PLoS Biology, 2(6), e187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dyson, F. J. (1979). Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe. Reviews of Modern Physics, 51(3), 447–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eysenck, H. J. (1997). Personality and experimental psychology: The unification of psychology and the possibility of a paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(6), 1224–1237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26(2), 309–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krauss, L. M., & Starkman, G. D. (2000). Life, the universe, and nothing: Life and death in an ever-expanding universe. The Astrophysical Journal, 531, 22–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newell, A. (1973). You can't play 20 questions with nature and win: Projective comments on the papers of this symposium. In Chase, W. G. (Ed.), Visual information processing: Proceedings of the eighth annual Carnegie symposium on cognition (pp. 283–310). Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scriven, M. (1956). A possible distinction between traditional scientific disciplines and the study of human behavior. In Feigl, H. & Scriven, M. (Eds.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 1, pp. 330–339). University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. Vintage.Google Scholar
Yarkoni, T. (2022). The generalizability crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45(e1), 1–78. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20001685CrossRefGoogle Scholar