Daily Archive

Modern psychology has a recurring weakness. It periodically falls in love with stories that feel morally urgent, then struggles to unwind them when the evidence turns out thin. That is not because psychologists are uniquely foolish. It is because the field studies messy human beings with noisy measures, ambiguous constructs, and strong social incentives. In that environment, a persuasive narrative can get promoted into “settled science” long before it is actually settled.

The replication crisis is the clearest public sign of this vulnerability. The Reproducibility Project’s large collaboration tried to replicate 100 psychology studies and found much weaker effects and far fewer statistically significant replications than the original literature suggested. (Science) Methodologists also showed how flexible analysis choices and reporting can inflate false positives unless stricter norms are enforced. (SAGE Journals) Meehl’s older critique still lands for the same reason: in “soft” areas of psychology, theories often fade away rather than being cleanly tested and retired. (Error Statistics Philosophy) The implication is not nihilism. It is epistemic humility, especially for claims that are politically charged and personally consequential.

Psychology’s history offers examples of ideas that persist on social momentum long after the evidence grows cloudy. The “memory wars” around repressed and recovered memories show how a compelling clinical narrative can endure in practice while mechanisms remain disputed, and how suggestion can complicate confident storytelling. (PMC) Lilienfeld and colleagues made the broader point in a different domain: weak measurement, loose constructs, and credulous clinical fashions predict confident claims that later demand painful correction. (Guilford Press) The pattern is simple: psychology is unusually prone to ideas becoming socially protected before they are empirically solid.

That is the right context for the strong activist version of “innate gender identity,” meaning the claim that very young children can reliably know and articulate a fixed inner gender that may mismatch their body, and that this knowledge should be treated as stable guidance for major decisions. Developmentally, this is exactly the kind of adult projection Piaget and Erikson warn against: treating children’s words as if they carry stable adult concepts while the child’s understanding and self-organization remain socially shaped and changeable. Even within clinical samples, trajectories are not uniform; intensity of childhood gender dysphoria is one known factor associated with persistence into adolescence, which is another way of saying early self-labels do not function like a universal diagnostic oracle. (PubMed) Clinically, the major classification systems are more cautious than the slogans: DSM-5-TR defines gender dysphoria around clinically significant distress or impairment, not the mere existence of an identity claim. (American Psychiatric Association) ICD-11 moved gender incongruence out of the mental disorders chapter and into “conditions related to sexual health,” partly to reduce stigma while preserving access to care. (World Health Organization)

The evidence environment around youth gender medicine shows why fad dynamics matter. The Cass Review argued the evidence base for medical interventions in minors is limited and often low certainty, urging caution and better research. (Utah Legislature) Substantial critiques dispute Cass’s methods and interpretation, which itself signals this is not a stable, high-consensus evidentiary domain. (PMC) The adult responsibility is therefore straightforward: treat childhood self-labels as developmentally real but conceptually limited; separate distress from metaphysics; demand the same evidentiary standards you would demand anywhere else in medicine; and resist turning a contested construct into a moral absolute. If psychology keeps rewarding certainty over rigor, the cost will not be merely bad theory. It will be policy and clinical practice that harden too early, then harm real people when the correction finally arrives.

Glossary

• Replication / reproducibility: Whether an independent team can rerun a study and obtain broadly similar results. (Science)
• Researcher degrees of freedom: The many choices researchers can make (when to stop collecting data, which outcomes to report, which analyses to run) that can unintentionally inflate “significant” findings. (SAGE Journals)
• P-hacking: Informal term for exploiting analytic flexibility to chase statistical significance. (SAGE Journals)
• Construct validity: Whether a measure actually captures the concept it claims to measure (not just something correlated with it). (General measurement concern emphasized in clinical-science critiques.) (Guilford Press)
• Gender dysphoria (DSM-5-TR): Clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence; not all gender-diverse people have dysphoria. (American Psychiatric Association)
• Gender incongruence (ICD-11): ICD-11 category placed under “conditions related to sexual health,” moved out of the mental disorders chapter. (World Health Organization)
• Persistence (in childhood GD research): Continued gender dysphoria into adolescence; research suggests persistence is not uniform, and intensity is one associated factor. (PubMed)

Short endnotes (audit-friendly)

1. Replication crisis anchor: Open Science Collaboration (2015), Science; effects in replications notably smaller; fewer significant replications. (Science)
2. Analytic flexibility / false positives: Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn (2011), “False-Positive Psychology.” (SAGE Journals)
3. Soft-psychology theory fade-out critique: Meehl (1978), “Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology.” (Error Statistics Philosophy)
4. Memory wars as an example of contested clinical narratives: Otgaar et al. (2019, PMC) on repression controversy; Loftus (2006) review on recovered/false memories; Loftus (2004) in The Lancet on the continuing dispute. (PMC)
5. Clinical-science warning about fads/pseudoscience: Lilienfeld et al., Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology (Guilford excerpts / volume). (Guilford Press)
6. DSM-5-TR framing: APA overview and DSM-related materials emphasize distress/impairment as the diagnostic core. (American Psychiatric Association)
7. ICD-11 move and rationale: WHO FAQ; supporting scholarly rationale for moving gender incongruence out of mental disorders while preserving access to care. (World Health Organization)
8. Persistence factor (intensity): Steensma et al. (2013) follow-up: intensity of childhood GD associated with persistence. (PubMed)
9. Cass Review debate: Cass Review final report PDF (archived copies); published critiques and responses indicating contested interpretation and ongoing debate. (Utah Legislature)