[Francisco Arocha, 95/07/03;23.23 EST]
Found this in a psychology newsgroup. Some of you may find it interesting.
Does anybody know of the research mentioned here? Sure seems like PCT!
cheers,
francisco
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Subject: Cargo Cult Science
Date: 27 Jun 1995 08:51:58 GMT
Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. at Aarhus University
Lines: 74
Message-ID: <3sogre$hee@belfort.daimi.aau.dk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rubus.daimi.aau.dk
Xref: news.mcgill.ca sci.psychology.misc:72 sci.psychology.theory:15Psychology is one of the disciplines that the American physicist
(and Nobel laureate) Richard Feynman used to call "cargo cult science".
In the South Sea isles after WWII there arose (according to Feynman)
cults providing places for the planes to land (bringing in cargo),
even making lights and control towers, with stuffed dolls as
technical staff.
You know what?
The planes didn't land. Everything looked *almost* right, everything
worked *almost* right; but the planes didn't land.And that's the way, Feynman maintained, with psychology. Its methods
are *almost* scientific, psychologists may *almost* be considered
scientists, and they *almost* have the (professional) integrity that's
needed in order to do science. But the planes don't land.
And that's a problem. Psychology is a discipline you can *almost*
take seriously.And why don't I repeat part of Feynman's arguments, which are as valid now
as ever?:From "Cargo Cult Science," by Richard Feynman (adapted from the Caltech
commencement address given in 1974):" [...]
All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however.
For example there have been many experiments running rats through all
kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man
named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors
all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side
where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the
third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went
immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the
other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the
textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could
tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used
chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell.
Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and
the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he
covered the corridor, and still the rats could tellHe finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when
they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in
sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally
was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third
door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment.
That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible,
because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using--not what you
think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what
conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything
in an experiment with rat-running.I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They
never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of
being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old
way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his
papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about
rats. In fact, he discovered *all* the things you have to do to discover
something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is
a characteristic of cargo cult science."