Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): Thread in which @jeremyfreese identifies one of the key problems with the Riskin/Feldman review: It is framed as a critique of my book, but nearly all of it is them taking issue with things that are not specific to TGL, or to social science genetics, but are just … Psychology https://twitter.com/jeremyfreese/status/1514436560598364164
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): @jeremyfreese Indeed, you could structure an entire Intro Psych syllabus around “things that Riskin/Feldman sound ignorant about but frame as a sinister conspiracy”…
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): Starting with “what IS psychology?”, aka what does it mean to study human mind and behavior, which are obviously linked with, but not reducible to, biology.
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): Riskin/Feldman insist that studying some phenotypes in relation to genetics is a “category error.” But the history of psych is full of examples where we change our minds about what type of thing something is….
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): See: consumption. Psychosis due to syphilis. Autism and “refrigerator mothers.” Schizophrenia and double-binds. Addiction. Sexual orientation. Happening now: gender dysphoria.
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): Next up: statistics in the behavioral sciences, including the normal distribution (ummm …. not a eugenic axiom) and correlations (which don’t stop being correlations if they differ across samples)
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): And then, a topic that is genuinely one of my favorite things to teach: Construct validity! psychology attempts to quantify intangibles like “stress” and “well-being” and, yes, the mysterious “Opennnes to Experience” lol. How do we do that? Start with some Cronbach & Meehl ….
Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k): (Jumping back to the allegations of “category error”, I really like this paper by Kendler and colleagues: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20860872/)