By Gretchen Gibbs
It’s almost always a treat to find the name of somebody you know in The New York Times. Today, however, I was saddened to see the name of a student I taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University before I retired. It was an article about how there are no longer enough internship sites for potential psychologists, with a quarter of the applicants unplaced. Some students find unaccredited experience, but many must wait a year to re-apply. The internship is essential to the granting of the Ph.D., so a large number of doctoral psychology students are floundering, their loans increasing as their hopes sink.

Joanna, the student featured in the article, had it all: intelligence, good grades, outside experience, and good references. Part of the problem is the economy, and the amount of money it costs an institution to provide good training, but another part is that there’s just too much competition in the field. I will return to this issue.

Another recent Times article about psychology concerned a Dutch academic, Diederik Stapel, who was found to have committed fraud in several dozen published papers. Some of these fraudulent findings were reported in the Times itself. The article talks about the dangers of psychology research, where data is not usually shared and journals don’t check statistics. One survey found that 70 percent of researchers acknowledged “cutting corners” in reporting data, and another, which looked at actual published studies, found that 50 percent contained at least one statistical error.

(I wrote an article for Zest a few months ago about the decline effect, how initial findings in science often do not hold up. Many esoteric explanations for this phenomenon have been put forward, but the problem of fraudulent data has not generally been explored.)

What do Joanna, the student without an internship, and Diederik Stapel have in common? I have no respect for Stapel, who has betrayed the ethics of my profession, while I am fond of Joanna. They have both, however, struggled to get ahead in an extremely competitive field.

“Publish or perish” applies in all academic fields, but in psychology as compared to, say, history or English, the publications must be empirical studies, usually with hundreds of participants. The data from these subjects must be collected, entered into the computer, analyzed, and written up. Without graduate student assistants and doctoral projects, it would be impossible to produce anywhere near the necessary number of studies per year, generally three or four. What if your study doesn’t produce the findings you hypothesized? Nobody will publish negative findings. The journals of the American Psychological Association generally reject over 90 percent of the submissions anyway. The level of the competition means that the temptation to “cut corners” in reporting data is enormous. I haven’t ever knowingly made errors in my publications or presentations, but I didn’t go back to check the raw data or the statistical work of my graduate students, who were also under pressure to publish as they applied for internships and jobs. I don’t know anybody who does that kind of checking.

My point is that the field is too competitive. There are too many psychology majors in college, most of whom are disappointed because they can’t get into graduate school. Then there are too many graduate students, who now can’t get internships, let alone jobs. Then in the universities there are too many researchers jockeying for position and promotion. When I started my professional career 40 years ago, psychology was a field more like the Humanities than the Sciences. Today, we keep finding out more and more about less and less. Most of the published articles aren’t interesting, having to do with esoteric aspects of problems nobody in the public would want to know about. As one of my students said, “Even my mother’s head falls into the mashed potatoes when I try to tell her about my dissertation.”

I’m not sure why psychology is so popular – a topic for another day. I don’t think it’s going to last, though. As the trend toward more and more competition continues, something self-correcting is going to happen. Students will drop out of psychology as a major, graduate applications will go down, and universities will struggle to recruit psychology professors. I will have mixed feelings about this development.

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