Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.
Hereâs a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing, ego depletion, growth mindset, stereotype threat, walking slower after reading the word âFloridaââall gone for good. Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead. This isnât true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it âpower posingâ anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on âembodimentâ and âexpansive postureâ, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026. People are even doing variations on the slow-walking study, but now in virtual reality. This leads to some absurd situations. One psychologist who used to work on stereotype threat now disavows the theory entirely: âI no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.â But another psychologist claims that âstereotype threat is real and virtually universal [...] there is a lot of evidence supporting [its] existence (and impact)â. Weâre not arguing about whether stereotype threat is powerful or weak, or whether it is pervasive or rare, but whether it is obviously alive or obviously dead. Thatâs literally the premise of a Monty Python sketch. It might seem like the way to resolve these disputes is to weigh up all the evidence, meta-analyze all the data, deploy your p-curves, your moderator analyses, and your tests for heterogeneity, maybe even run a big, multi-lab, preregistered replication. Do all that and then weâll finally know whether these effects are real or not! This is a trap. We have spent the past decade doing exactly those things, and yet here we are. Clearly, no amount of data-collecting, number-crunching, or bias-correcting is going to lay these theories to rest, nor will it return them to the land of the living. We need a different approach. And so we must turn, as we so often do, to the source of all truly important ideas in the philosophy of science: the sci-fi universe of Halo. In Halo, Spartan super soldiers never officially die; they are only ever listed as âmissing in actionâ. (This is meant to keep morale high among a hyper-militarized human culture that is on the verge of being exterminated by evil aliens.) I think we should adopt a similar scheme for scientific phenomena: they never die. They merely become embarrassing. This isnât how science is supposed to work, of course. The secret sauce of science is supposed to be falsifiability: it ainât science unless you can kill it. If I claim that all swans are white, and you show up with a black swan, then Iâm supposed to bid a tearful goodbye to my theory and send it to that big farm upstate where it can frolic and play with all the other failed hypotheses. Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, âHmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!â And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days. Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it. And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases, few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents. For instance, there are still physics PhDs trying to prove that the sun orbits the Earth. That might be disturbing, but itâs also necessaryâif no one was ever willing to entertain crazy ideas, we wouldnât have any scientific progress at all. We have to keep some kooks around because occasionally, as the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, âa crackpot hits the jackpotâ.1 The persistence and necessity of kookiness means weâll never be able to say that a theory is well and truly dead. We can, however, say when a theory is embarrassing. If I deny the possibility of a black swan, and you produce something that looks awfully like a black swan, itâs still possible that I will prevailâmaybe weâll discover your black swan is actually a white swan covered in soot, or DNA analysis will vindicate my âdusky duckâ theory. But if I didnât expect a black swan-looking thing to exist at all, my hypothesis is a lot less plausible than it was before, and itâs much more embarrassing to believe in it. This is the situation we appear to be in with many theories in psychology. We canât say whether theyâre ârealâ or not. Somewhere out there, the Spartans may live on. But if weâve been studying something for decades and people look at all the evidence and they still doubt whether it exists at all, we have to admit: thatâs cringe. Cringe doesnât mean wrong! Continental drift was cringe.2 Germ theory was cringe.3 Smallpox vaccination was cringe.4 All of them went from mortifying to undeniable. Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and itâs not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if itâs old and itâs still cringe, it probably has no merit. Thatâs why I am not optimistic about any big-name theory in psychology that has gone the wrong direction on the Cool-Cringe Continuum over the past ten yearsâitâs not impossible for them to make a comeback, but itâs not the way things usually go. Still, no matter how ropey things get for these theories, it makes no sense to write them off as ânot realâ. If stereotype threat truly doesnât exist, that means you could never, under any circumstances, run a study that produces results in line with the theory. Thatâs a crazy claim to make! We donât have nearly enough evidence to support such a conclusion, and we never will.5 In fact, insisting that certain effects are ânot realâ merely provides an incentive for people to keep studying them, because it makes their results newsworthy: âLook, weâre proving the existence of a supposedly nonexistent effect!â But of course itâs rare for anyone to actually prove such a thing. Instead, they are almost always âprovingâ that, given infinitely flexible theories and infinite ways to test them, you can produce some small effect that kind-of sort-of accords with some version of the hypothesis, broadly construed. No one should claim that this is impossible, and no one should get credit for showing that it is possible. If we appreciated how hard it is to kill a theory for good, maybe weâd stop wasting our time trying to do exactly that. For instance, ego depletionâthe idea that willpower is a âmuscleâ that can get âfatiguedâ by overuseâhas been the subject of at least three big replication attempts. This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2016 found no effect (N = 2,141). This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 also found no effect (N = 3,531). But oops, this other preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 did find an effect (N = 1,775). At this point, maybe we should cut it out with all the preregistered multi-lab replications and just admit this theory is never going to die, and to spend any more effort investigating it would be embarrassing for all involved. Science snobs love to claim that this problem is unique to the social sciences, as if falsification is a breeze everywhere else. But it isnât. For example, when Arthur Eddington went out to test the theory of relativity by photographing an eclipse in 1919, he ended up throwing out several pictures that âdidnât workâ. He reasoned that the sun had heated the glass of his telescope unevenly, throwing off the results. Was that fair? Was it right? Were those pictures legitimate and failed tests of the theory, or were they tainted by faultyâŚ
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