There are very few hard set laws in psychology. That said, OP is wrong. There is not a study contradicting each other study. The problem is that human behavior is not very deterministic, save for a few subset of conditions and behaviors.
Psychology did have a reproducibility and p level crisis. However, in my opinion this was the result of external political and financial pressures over universities and research institutions. Which deviated and forced theoretical analysis and statistical experimental designs that were not suited for psychological research. Researchers were forced to design and construct studies in ways that ensured publishing, grants and finance. Instead of good theory and science.
The second factor is bad science communication. Psychology is a field were everyone feels entitled to talk with authority because it is about the human existence, and we are all human after all, no? However this leads to a high degree of disinformation that makes it hard to separate science from opinion, and often times political agendas too. This of course makes it seem like psychology as a science is less reliable than it is. Because it gets mixed in the same bag as pseudoscientific slop.
When you sift through the misinformation and read hard psychology science, then you notice a third thing. A lot of the hard science is on neurological functional psychology. Which is dry and not very interesting to sell in blogs, tweets, and reels. And the softer, social science side, that is virtually ignored by media, because it tends to reflect that capitalism and western civilization is destroying mental health. So there’s no interest to promote that idea or to acknowledge that, we know how to fix a lot of problems. But it requires dismantling a lot of power structures.
pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
It was definitely true in my experience- the general feeling was that it’s very hard to prove any general rules in psychology, because there are so many factors. You want to be able to say “people are ___” but people are just way too complex.