by spwa4 | 2026-01-26 14:49:56+00:00
The problem with psychology and the social sciences in general is that they're not neutral. The original justification for having management at all is something called "scientific management".

The argument is that if you have a company, in the original meaning of a group of people working together with people individually paid per item they produce, where "new employees" (between quotes because they're not paid at that point) essentially train with more experienced employees to start producing more. The idea of management, introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is to have people specifically dedicated to studying and improving the workflow of people, to become experts at making the workflow better, now known as "Taylorism". That justified middle management, in that this optimization would increase a company's productivity, and that lead to people doing what middle management still does. Before Taylorism, outside of the company owners, employees competed for wages in a competition like in "Monsters, Inc", with no-one reporting to anyone.

There's a slight issue: Frederick Winslow Taylor was a con man. The experiment, introducing management, in reality lowered productivity by about 20%. It did not raise it. He kept "scientific records", measurements of productivity in a notebook and that notebook was presented to the owners of the railway. Turns out, he faked the numbers, both directly by just presenting fake numbers and by paying the company (as in the individual workers) more by faking accounts, resulting in a temporary boost in productivity. Oops.

Repeated experiments showed the same. Having everyone in a company directly responsible for the functioning of the company as a whole, by being held responsible, financially, for their own work, works ... better than having management layers, according to the experiments done on the subject. You will find the social sciences defend an entirely different view. Oops.

Has psychology or social sciences changed social sciences (specifically organizational psychology's) view on either Taylor or Scientific Management? No. They used it as one of the bases of the rest of psychology, of the rest of social sciences as if it was good science.

This was not the first, not the last, and certainly not the most serious problem in psychology or social sciences.

Some other famous problematic science. The Stanford prison experiment was faked [1]. Oops. No, that is not why people attack each other, it turns out it works far more direct. The Freudian view of psychology is not only thoroughly discredited, it is now strongly suspected that Sigmund Freud deliberately created this view to allow raping of women [2] (Freud is the person that created modern psychoanalysis, and he earned the equivalent of billions of dollars for getting rapists of the hook in court, he even had a few "successes", cases were rape victims got imprisoned, by order of a court that knew they were rape victims, in cases were the rapist was on trial. He got paid the very big Guilders for that). With that, of course, comes the reality that Freud was not an innocent scientist that came up with a wrong conclusion but a con man who caused incredible suffering for thousands of women, and hundreds of men (usually girls and boys that got raped). Autism is not an explanation of a condition of the human mind but, in the words of the creator/discoverer of Autism, Hans Asperger "serves to purify the genes of the noble Aryan race" [3] (note: yes, Autism's purpose was to purify genes by executing children). We know that being the victim of a crime raises the odds of the victim later imitating the perpetrator and committing the same crime, and to make matters worse this is a strong effect in unrelated adults, but it's stronger in adolescents, and also again stronger within families compared to between unrelated people. Note: this is not revenge, it's imitation. Victims commit the crime they were victimized by against other people, NOT the perpetrator (although if you look at it game theoretically it explains why human societies choose revenge punishments). Oops.

Psychology and social sciences are not positivist sciences. The purpose is not to explain the human mind, but to justify predetermined outcomes. Especially the "discovery of Autism" illustrates this perfectly. Autism does not explain the behavior of some children, not back then, not now, and back then it justified the locking up and even executions of undesirable children, something the political climate between the two world wars really wanted to happen. Yes, you see the reverse now, but only because the political climate has changed again, not because the attitude of those sciences has changed, and you should not be surprised that if Trump stays and, say, Le Pen gets into power in France, new "psychological discoveries" will ... suddenly turn out to justify what ICE is doing, and no doubt, worse. In fact I'd argue that's exactly what's starting to happen [4].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_Coverup (although frankly, look up what Freud's theory actually says and do you really need someone to tell you that is bullshit? Freud claims the only source of motivation for men and boys is to kill their father and rape their mother. And the only source of motivation for women and girls is to seduce men to rape them, preferably their own family. The point of Freud's theories, according to Freud's colleagues, is that it played really well in court: if a father raped his daughters or granddaughters or nieces or ... then he could not help it, it is human nature, and those daughters and nieces (and occasionally sons and nephews) really were really behind getting him to do it. Hence how does it make sense to punish him? Oh and Freud also offered services to treat/imprison those children/girls/women, of course at very high prices)

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race...