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Comment by jamp897 | Hacker News Reader

Psychology in the west is really a form of cultural anthropology, in that it’s just measuring behaviors for a specific set of people but not the underline mind directly. So this would make sense IMO that you can’t repeat many of the studies because they’re not grounded in the fundamentals of the mind but a layer abstracted a way by cultures and habits. Akin to strudying a Toyota car and trying to generalize all of physics from it.

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I have a more cynical view: it's a field that almost exclusively deals in the creation and enforcement of behavioral norms; entirely political, verging on religious in its continual reification of theory-theory. I don't know what that has to do with the West, though.

Behaviorism is the only real psychology.

Exactly, the west part is that we tend to think that everything in the west is the whole world or whole field, when Asia is light years ahead in this case in that they focus on the underlining logic mathematically.

What's your basis for this view? Any good reads you can recommend?

The core issue is that you need to establish a norm, but without an absolute point of reference such as enlightenment it’s like trying to walk strait in a dessert which is not possible. But if you bring this point up of going in circles they act just like Plato describes in his Cave Alegory. So it’s not a new issue. I don’t know if anyone has written a book specifically about psychology being a faux science, like eugenics in a way, but someone should.

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