Book Review: Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work and Pretends to Work

Abstract

This book aims to disinfect egregious practices in social science by illustrating errors commonly made by many social scientists, including some with Nobel prizes. Professor John Staddon (JS) is one of those rare individuals held in equally high regard for his seminal works in experimental and theoretical Psychology (Staddon, 2001), and readers stand to greatly benefit from the litany of suggestions borne of JS's experience. One notable highlight is the author's long-standing criticism of static (time-independent) theorizing in Psychology, which generally requires some “executive control” system to initiate operations (cf., Bandura's self-system—p. 63). The author suggests that psychological scientists incorporate time as a constitutive element within their explanatory models, fortifying his thesis through examples of complex behavioral systems, such as a child's expectation of punishment following a display of aggression (p. 66), without reference to some intervening all-knowing homunculus. Professor JS is among the forerunners of the silent behavioristic renaissance (Staddon, 2014) and readers may be surprised to know how this once maligned science of “muscle twitches” and “glandular squirts” (Bower, 2014) evolved into a compelling alternative to buttress against the excessive “surplus meaning” underlying information processing approaches in Psychology (Amsel, 1992).