How statistics became a "forbidden trick" for Soviet psychologists.

Abstract

This study reconstructs the process by which quantitative methods were gradually displaced from Russian psychology in the early Soviet period. By the early 1930s, there was a decline in the importance of mathematical methods in psychological disciplines. It was accompanied by the rejection of some mathematical methods and the ideologization of the description of quantitative methodology. After the Central Committee's decree "O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniyakh v sisteme Narkomprosov" ("On Pedological Perversions in the System of Narkomproses") of 1936 was published in the pages of national newspapers, statistical practice was completely discredited. At the same time, textbooks on statistics in psychological disciplines were withdrawn from circulation. Scientists' attempts to defend the neutrality of scientific methods were unsuccessful and were publicly criticized. As a result, statistical practice almost completely disappeared from psychological disciplines after 1936, although there was no outright ban on the use of statistics. There are two possible reasons for this. First, psychologists may have abandoned statistical practices as a result of ideological pressure. Second, owing to the elimination of mathematical methods, internal disciplinary contradictions-in particular, those characteristic of pedology-were eliminated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).