“Zombie Ideas” in psychology, from personality profiling to lucky golf balls

Dorothy Bishop recently linked to this 2019 post by psychology researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, who wrote:

Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies.

If you think that formal science training will zombie-proof your mind, you’re out of luck . . . They also fester in our own field, quietly biding their time in peer-reviewed papers and textbooks, waiting to infect another generation of unsuspecting psychological scientists.

Barrett offers some examples:

Evolutionary psychologists have argued for years that waist-to-hip ratio is a phenotypic cue to reproductive success . . . I’d heard this claim repeated enough times that I assumed the empirical case was a done deal. . . . Nevertheless, there is no evidence that healthy women with larger waist-to-hip ratios are less fecund or fertile than women with smaller ratios . . . It’s a zombie idea. Ditto for the “body symmetry” hypothesis, which survives despite the empirical evidence . . . Nor do human perceivers infer emotions from particular configurations of facial muscle movements in a reliable and specific way . . .

Interesting. I haven’t followed these particular areas of research, and Barrett could be missing some details about some of these, but she supplies references so you can follow up in more depth if you’d like. Indeed, there was some disagreement in the comment section, including from Max Krasnow, a psychology lecturer at Harvard. Barrett is a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and in the comments she suggested that the two of them meet for coffee to discuss. Several other commenters wrote they’d be interested in a joint article by Barrett and Krasnow going over their points of disagreement. In a followup post a month later, Barrett reported on their coffee discussion:

After some lively discussion, we determined that our disagreements on most topics hinged on different vocabulary and semantics, except for one: waist-to-hip ratio in human females and its alleged relationship to reproductive success. In fact, when I wrote, “There should be a special place in hell, filled with mirrors, reserved for people who suggest that waist or hip size predicts anything important about a woman!”, some young scientists who study evolutionary psychology experienced my words as mean-spirited. I had meant them as a joking commentary on being a woman in a culture that is preoccupied with looks and dress size. Taking an aisle seat sometimes means acknowledging that the message you intend is different from the one received. I offer a deeply felt apology to those who were offended by my ill-fated attempt at humor. Look for more about my discussion with Max in a future column, along with an Observer article highlighting the recent developments in research on waist-to-hip ratio.

I did some googling but did not find this future column—maybe it got preempted by covid?

The calls are coming from inside the house

Here’s the frustrating thing. Barrett wrote the above columns back in 2019 when she was the president of the Association for Psychological Science. Only two years later, that very same Association for Psychological Science was pushing the “lucky golf ball” study which was both ridiculous on its face and also had been subject to a failed replication.

Talk about zombies!

As I wrote at the time, the Association for Psychological Science was promoted junk science while ignoring the careful, serious work of replication.

I don’t blame Barrett for this, not at all. You can’t hold her responsible for the action of the society more than a year after she left her leadership position.

As we’ve discussed, the problem is not just that there are some zombie ideas in science or that some scientists pursue zombie ideas. The zombie ideas are being pushed by the core of the scientific establishment (the Association for Psychological Science and the National Academy of Sciences), as well as by the media establishment (NPR, etc.) and the big-money establishment (Ted talks, etc.). It’s himmicanes all the way down. I think some of these organizations are getting better—at least, there’s nothing here that seems as horrible as the lucky golf ball study, so that’s something.