La llamada crisis teórica de la psicología y las alternativas propuestas para sortearla

Autores/as

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34024/prometeica.2024.30.16057

Palabras clave:

teoría, fenómenos, constructos, predicción, modelos

Resumen

La ciencia es la práctica que proporciona las afirmaciones más garantizadas epistémicamente que se pueden hacer, e implica la posibilidad de que eventualmente las teorías explicativas sean reemplazadas por otras mejores. En el caso de la Psicología, el proceso de formulación de teorías mediante el método científico ha sido dificultoso y ha generado la preocupación de los psicólogos científicos. Es así que en 1978 Meehl publicó un texto seminal acerca de la debilidad de las teorías psicológicas, que ha tenido una gran influencia hasta el día de hoy, con distintos autores describiendo una crisis teórica de la Psicología. El presente manuscrito realiza una revisión del panorama actual de la situación, caracterizando a la crisis, a los factores asociados y las propuestas para solucionarla. En relación con los factores asociados a la crisis, se reseñan la juventud de la Psicología, el énfasis en los datos, problemas en las definiciones de los constructos y en su medición, y dificultades para determinar la causalidad en la Psicología. Con respecto a las soluciones, se revisan a las propuestas de inclusión de formación en construcción de teorías en los planes de estudio, a la integración de habilidades interdisciplinarias, al ciclo de formación de teorías, y la formación de teorías. Se concluye acerca la necesidad de incluir a la formación teórica dentro de las currículas universitarias, así como en la posibilidad de que la Psicología Teórica sea una especialización viable para los psicólogos.

Métricas

Cargando métricas ...

Biografía del autor/a

  • Nicolás Alejandro Vizioli, Universidad de Buenos Aires - Facultad de Psicología

    Magíster en Psicodiagnóstico y Evaluación Psicológica UBA. Licenciado en Psicología UBA. Doctorando en Psicología UBA. Profesor Asociado a cago  de Introducción al Pensamiento Científico, Programa UBA XXI, UBA. Profesor Adjunto a cargo de la Práctica Profesional 852: Abordaje Comunitario en Barrios Vulnerables, Facultad de Psicología, UBA. Auxiliar docente de Teoría y Ténica de Exploración y Diagnóstico Psicológico Módulo I: Ténicas Psicométricas, Facultad de Psicología UBA. Investigador formado UBACyT.

Referencias

Akerlof, G. A., & Michaillat, P. (2018). Persistence of false paradigms in low-power sciences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(52), 13228–13233. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816454115

Bardi, A. (2023). The Archimedean Revolution of Nicolaus Copernicus. Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, (14), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.24117/2526-2270.2022.i14.09.

Benjamin, D. J., Berger, J. O., Johannesson, M., Nosek, B. A., Wagenmakers, E.-J., Berk, R., … Johnson, V. E. (2018). Redefine statistical significance. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0189-z

Borsboom, D., & Cramer, A. O. (2013). Network analysis: an integrative approach to the structure of psychopathology. Annual review of clinical psychology, 9, 91-121. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-050212-185608

Borsboom, D., van der Maas, H. L. J., Dalege, J., Kievit, R. A., & Haig, B. D. (2021). Theory construction methodology: A practical framework for building theories in psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 756–766. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620969647

Brandes, U., Robins, G., McCranie, A., & Wasserman, S. (2013). What is network science?. Network science, 1(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2013.2

Bird, A. (2021). Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(4), 965-993. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy051

Bunge, M. (1982). Demarcating science from pseudoscience. Fundamenta Scientiae, 3(3/4), 369-388.

Bunge, M. (1983). Treatise on basic philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & methodology II: Understanding the world (Vol. 6). Springer Science & Business Media.

Bunge, M. (1984). What is pseudoscience? The Skeptical Inquirer, 9(1), 36-47.

Bunge, M. (1991). What is science? Does it matter to distinguish it from pseudoscience? A reply to my commentators. New ideas in psychology, 9(2), 245-283. https://doi.org/10.1016/0732-118X(91)90030-P

Bunge, M. (2012). Scientific research II: The search for truth. Springer Science & Business Media.

Bunge, M. (2018). La ciencia: su método y su filosofía (Vol. 1). Laetoli.

Bunn, G. C. (2017). Wilhelm Wundt and the emergence of scientific psychology. Psychology Review, 22(3), 10-12. https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617978/1/PsychRev%20proof2.pdf

Centeno-Leyva, S., & Dominguez-Lara, S. (2020). La replicabilidad en la investigación psicológica: una reflexión. Interacciones, 6(3), e172. http://dx.doi.org/10.24016/2020.v6n3.172

Conway, A. R., Kovacs, K., Hao, H., Goring, S. A., & Schmank, C. (2020). The Struggle is Real: Challenges and Solutions in Theory Building. Psychological Inquiry, 31(4), 302-309. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1853468

Cummins, R. (2000). “How does it work?” versus “What are the laws?”: Two conceptions of psychological explanation. En F. C. Keil & R. A. Wilson (Eds.), Explanation and Cognition (p. 117–144). The MIT Press.

Epskamp, S. (2017). Network psychometrics. University of Amsterdam.

Epskamp, S., Borsboom, D., & Fried, E. I. (2018). Estimating psychological networks and their accuracy: A tutorial paper. Behavior research methods, 50, 195-212. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0862-1

Eronen, M. I. (2020). Causal discovery and the problem of psychological interventions. New Ideas in Psychology, 59, 100785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2020.100785

Eronen, M. I., & Bringmann, L. F. (2021). The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward. Perspectives on psychological science: a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 16(4), 779–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970586

Fabrigar, L. R., & Wegener, D. T. (2016). Conceptualizing and evaluating the replication of research results. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 68-80.

Fisher, R. A. (1956). Statistical methods and scientific inference. Oliver & Boyd.

Fisher, R. A. (1966). The design of experiments (8th ed.). Oliver & Boyd.

Fisher, R. A. (1967). Statistical methods for research workers (13th ed). Oliver & Boyd.

Flake, J., & Fried, E. (2020). Measurement schmeasurement: Questionable measurement practices and how to avoid them. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(4), 456-465. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920952393

Flake, J. K., Pek, J., & Hehman, E. (2017). Construct validation in social and personality research: Current practice and recommendations. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(4), 370-378. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693063

Flis, I. (2019). Psychologists psychologizing scientific psychology: An epistemological reading of the replication crisis. Theory & Psychology, 29(2), 158-181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354319835322

Fortunato, S., Bergstrom, C. T., Börner, K., Evans, J. A., Helbing, D., Milojević, S., Petersen, A. M., Radicchi, F., Sinatra, R., Uzzi, B., Vespignani, A., Waltman, L., Wang, D., & Barabási, A. L. (2018). Science of science. Science, 359(6379), eaao0185. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao0185

Fried, E. I. (2017a). What are psychological constructs? On the nature and statistical modelling of emotions, intelligence, personality traits and mental disorders. Health Psychology Review, 11(2), 130–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2017.1306718

Fried, E. I. (2017b). The 52 symptoms of major depression: Lack of content overlap among seven common depression scales. Journal of Affective Disorders, 208, 191–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.10.019

Fried, E. I. (2020a). Lack of theory building and testing impedes progress in the factor and network literature. Psychological Inquiry, 31(4), 271–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1853461

Fried, E. I. (2020b). Theories and models: What they are, what they are for, and what they are about. Psychological Inquiry, 31(4), 336-344. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1854011

Fried E. I., Flake J. K. (2018). Measurement matters. APS Observer, 31(3), 29–30. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/measurement-matters

Gershman S. J. (2019). How to never be wrong. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 26(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1488-8

Haig, B. D. (2009). Inference to the best explanation: A neglected approach to theory appraisal in psychology. The American journal of psychology, 122(2), 219-234.

Hansson, S. O. (2013). Defining pseudoscience and science. En M. Pigliucci, & M. Boudry (Eds.), Philosophy of pseudoscience (pp. 61–77). University of Chicago Press.

Harding, S. (1976). Can theories be refuted? Essays on the Duhem–Quine thesis. D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Haslbeck, J. M. B., Ryan, O., Robinaugh, D. J., Waldorp, L. J., & Borsboom, D. (2022). Modeling psychopathology: From data models to formal theories. Psychological methods, 27(6), 930–957. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000303

Heino, M. T., Fried, E. I., & LeBel, E. P. (2017). Commentary: Reproducibility in psychological science: When do psychological phenomena exist?. Frontiers in psychology, 1004. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01004

Hodson, G. (2021). Construct jangle or construct mangle? Thinking straight about (nonredundant) psychological constructs. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 5(4), 576–590. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.120

Hughes, S., De Houwer, J., & Perugini, M. (2016). The functional-cognitive framework for psychological research: Controversies and resolutions. International journal of psychology : Journal international de psychologie, 51(1), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12239

Illari, P. M., & Russo, F. (2014). Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice. Oxford University Press.

Jovanović, G. (2021). How psychology repressed its founding father Wilhelm Wundt. Human Arenas, 4(1), 32-47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-021-00186-2

Kardas, E. P., & Henley, T. B. (2019). Introduction: What would Wundt think?. En Henley, T. B., Rossano, M. J., & Kardas, E. P. (Eds.) Handbook of cognitive archaeology: Psychology in prehistory (pp. 3-18). Routledge.

Kellen, D. (2019). A model hierarchy for psychological science. Computational Brain & Behavior, 2, 160-165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-019-00037-y

Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The essential tension. University of Chicago Press.

Lakatos, I. (1970). Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. En I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge (pp. 91–195). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lakatos, I. (1978). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge University Press.

Leahey, E., Beckman, C. M., & Stanko, T. L. (2017). Prominent but less productive: The impact of interdisciplinarity on scientists’ research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 62(1), 105–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839216665364

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2004). Taking theoretical risks in a world of directional predictions. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 11(1), 47-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appsy.2004.02.008

Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., & Ammirati, R. J. (2014). Science Versus Pseudoscience. The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118625392.wbecp572

Lilienfeld, S. O., & Strother, A. N. (2020). Psychological measurement and the replication crisis: Four sacred cows. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne, 61(4), 281–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000236

Malich, L., & Rehmann-Sutter, C. (2022). Metascience is not enough–a plea for psychological humanities in the wake of the replication crisis. Review of General Psychology, 26(2), 261-273. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268022108387

Meehl, P. E. (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(4), 806–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.46.4.806

Millner, A. J., Robinaugh, D. J., & Nock, M. K. (2020). Advancing the Understanding of Suicide: The Need for Formal Theory and Rigorous Descriptive Research. Trends in cognitive sciences, 24(9), 704–716. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.007

Mora Romo, J. F. (2021). Programas de intervención y replicabilidad: consideraciones sobre su evaluación en psicología. Revista Iberoamericana de psicología, 14(1), 93–104. https://doi.org/10.33881/2027-1786.rip.14108

Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(3), 221-229. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1

Oberauer, K., & Lewandowsky, S. (2019). Addressing the theory crisis in psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(5), 1596–1618. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01645-2

Paniagua, D., Sánchez-Iglesias, I., Miguel-Alvaro, A., Casas-Aragonez, N., Aparicio-Garcia, M. E., & Aguayo-Estremera, R. (2022). Prácticas Cuestionables en Estudios de Validez de Instrumentos de Medición Psicológica: Comunalidades y Unicidades de la Crisis de Replicabilidad en el Campo de la Psicometría. Revista iberoamericana de diagnóstico y evaluación psicológica, 5(66), 23-34. https://doi.org/10.21865/RIDEP66.5.02

Pearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why: the new science of cause and effect. Basic books.

Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Harper & Row.

Proulx, T., & Morey, R. (2021). Beyond statistical ritual: theory in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 671-681.

Rescorla, M. (2018). An interventionist approach to psychological explanation. Synthese, 195(5), 1909-1940. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1553-2

Rigdon, E. E. (2016). Choosing PLS path modeling as analytical method in European management research: A realist perspective. European Management Journal, 34(6), 598-605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2016.05.006

Robinaugh, D. J., Haslbeck, J. M. B., Ryan, O., Fried, E. I., & Waldorp, L. J. (2021). Invisible hands and fine calipers: A call to use formal theory as a toolkit for theory construction. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 725–743. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620974697

Rzhetsky, A., Foster, J. G., Foster, I. T., & Evans, J. A. (2015). Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(47), 14569–14574. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509757112

Scheel, A. M. (2022). Why most psychological research findings are not even wrong. Infant and Child Development, 31(1), e2295. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2295

Scheel, A. M., Tiokhin, L., Isager, P. M., & Lakens, D. (2021). Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 16(4), 744–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620966795

Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1359–1366. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632

Slaney, K. L., & Garcia, D. A. (2015). Constructing psychological objects: The rhetoric of constructs. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 35(4), 244–259. https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000025

Smaldino, P. E. (2017). Models are stupid, and we need more of them. En R. R. Vallacher, S. J. Read, & A. Nowak (Eds.), Computational social psychology (pp. 311–331). Routledge.

Smaldino P. (2019). Better methods can't make up for mediocre theory. Nature, 575(7781), 9. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03350-5

Smaldino, P. E., & O’Connor, C. (2022). Interdisciplinarity can aid the spread of better methods between scientific communities. Collective Intelligence, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137221131816

Suárez, M., & Pero, F. (2019). The representational semantic conception. Philosophy of Science, 86(2), 344-365. https://doi.org/10.1086/702029

Suppes, P. (1966). Models of data. En Robinson, A. (1966). Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics (Vol. 44, pp. 252–261). Elsevier.

Trout, J. D. (2004). The philosophical legacy of Meehl (1978): confirmation theory, theory quality, and scientific epistemology. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 11(1), 73-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appsy.2004.02.013

Vaidyanathan, U. (2020). Theory, in Practice. Psychological Inquiry, 31(4), 334-335. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1853479

van Rooij, I., & Baggio, G. (2020). Theory development requires an epistemological sea change. Psychological Inquiry, 31(4), 321–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1853477

van Rooij, I., & Baggio, G. (2021). Theory Before the Test: How to Build High-Verisimilitude Explanatory Theories in Psychological Science. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 16(4), 682–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970604

Wagenmakers E. J. (2007). A practical solution to the pervasive problems of p values. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 14(5), 779–804. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03194105

Wagenmakers, E.-J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., van der Maas, H. L. J., & Kievit, R. A. (2012). An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 632-638. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612463078

Widaman, K. F., & Revelle, W. (2023). Thinking thrice about sum scores, and then some more about measurement and analysis. Behavior Research Methods, 55(2), 788-806. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01849-w

Woodward, J. F. (2011). Data and phenomena: A restatement and defense. Synthese, 182(1), 165–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9618-5

Zeng, A., Shen, Z., Zhou, J., Wu, J., Fan, Y., Wang, Y., & Stanley, H. E. (2017). The science of science: From the perspective of complex systems. Physics reports, 714, 1-73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2017.10.001

Publicado

2024-07-08

Cómo citar

Vizioli, N. A. (2024). La llamada crisis teórica de la psicología y las alternativas propuestas para sortearla. Prometeica - Revista De Filosofía Y Ciencias, 30, 161-175. https://doi.org/10.34024/prometeica.2024.30.16057
Recibido 2023-12-24
Aceptado 2024-06-28
Publicado 2024-07-08