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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)
- Replication crisis anchor: Open Science Collaboration (2015), Science; effects in replications notably smaller; fewer significant replications. (Science)
- Analytic flexibility / false positives: Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn (2011), “False-Positive Psychology.” (SAGE Journals)
- 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)
- 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)
- Clinical-science warning about fads/pseudoscience: Lilienfeld et al., Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology (Guilford excerpts / volume). (Guilford Press)
- DSM-5-TR framing: APA overview and DSM-related materials emphasize distress/impairment as the diagnostic core. (American Psychiatric Association)
- 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)
- Persistence factor (intensity): Steensma et al. (2013) follow-up: intensity of childhood GD associated with persistence. (PubMed)
- Cass Review debate: Cass Review final report PDF (archived copies); published critiques and responses indicating contested interpretation and ongoing debate. (Utah Legislature)
To be honest, I could excerpt most of Bowlby’s book. It is that good. However, little things like time and copyright concerns limit me to providing some of the highlights of attachment theory and how big a change it was from traditional psychoanalysis.
“The first is to provide the patient with a secure base from which he can explore the various unhappy and painful aspects of his life, past and present, many of which he finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to think about and reconsider without a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy, and, on occasion, guidance.
A second is to assist the patient in his explorations by encouraging him to consider the ways in which he engages in relationships with significant figures in his current life, what his expectations are for his own feelings and behaviour and for those of other people, what unconscious biases he may be bringing when he selects a person with whom he hopes to make an intimate relationship and when he creates situations that go badly for him.
A particular relationship that the therapist encourages the patient to examine, and that constitutes the third task, is the relationship between the two of them. Into this the patient will import all of those perceptions, constructions, and expectations of how an attachment figure is likely to feel and behave towards him that his working models of parents and self dictate.
A fourth task is to encourage the patient to consider how his current perceptions and expectations and the feelings and actions to which they give rise
may be the product either of the events and situations he encountered during his childhood and adolescence, especially those with his parents, or else as the products of what he may repeatedly have been told by them. This is often a painful and difficult process and not infrequently requires the therapist sanction his patient to consider as possibilities ideas and feelings about his parents that he has hitherto regarded as unimaginable and unthinkable. In doing so a patent may find himself moved by strong emotions and urges to action, some directed towards his parents and some towards the therapist, and many of which he finds frightening and/or alien and unacceptable.
The therapist’s fifth task is to enable his patient to recognize that his images (models) of himself and others, derived either from past painful experiences or from misleading messages emanating from a parent, but all to often in the literature mislabelled as ‘fantasies’, may or may not be appropriate to his present future; or indeed, may never have been justified. Once he has grasped the nature of his governing images (models) and has traced their origins, he may begin to understand what has led him to see the world and himself as he does and so to feel, to think, and to act in the way he does.
He is then in a position to reflect on the accuracy and adequacy of those images (models), and on the ideas and actions to which they lead, in the light of his current experiences of emotionally significant people, including the therapist as well as his parents, and of himself in relationships to each. Once the process has started he begins to see the old images (models) for what they are, the not unreasonable products of his past experiences or of what he has repeatedly been told, and thus feel free to imagine alternatives better fitted to his current life. By these means the therapist hopes to enable his patient to cease being a slave to old and unconscious stereotypes and to feel, to think, and act in new ways. “
-John Bowlby. A Secure Base. pp. 138 – 139.
Now I like me some psychology and here is the thing; these five points share much with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), and it looks so simple on paper, yet in the real world the therapeutic process is fraught with so many difficulties and variables.
I often substitute teach with at-risk children and let me assure you, I use any/all of what is said by Bowlby. How do you learn when you don’t feel safe? The quick answer is nothing, but as even this brief quotation shows there is so much that goes into how we react to situations and our learned set of responses to them.
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