zlacker

It always bothers me when someone says, "that's so obvious, what's the point in doing a study on it?"

> What are these results actually telling us that the average person doesn’t already know?

Nothing. It's a trivial claim, but does this imply we should not research it?

An enormous amount of effort in the hard sciences is dedicated to proving/stating:

* Claims that on their face appear trivial - like 1+1=2, or the "two points determine a line" postulate

* Things that seem obvious and hardly worth stating - like the pigeonhole principle, or laws of associativity/commutativity/distributivity

* Seemingly redundant re-phrasings of the thesis (every theorem, once it clicks)

But these sorts of mathematical rules become increasingly non-obvious when combined with each other. There is a reason the hard sciences works like this: you want to arrange knowledge hierarchically. You need to have a foundation of knowledge in order to do anything more complex.

The social sciences don't work like this, but they should. Whenever someone proves obvious things, they get told, "why are you wasting time proving that? Everyone already knows that." But psychology, with its replication crises, has a long way to go before it becomes like a hard science. You need to accumulate a hierarchy of proven foundations.

>>Akrana+(OP)
Things everyone "knows" are often not known at all, they are just assumed.

>>Akrana+(OP)
Seems to me that a good rule of thumb in the replication crisis in Psychology was that if an articles claim seemed kind of “obvious” (where you would like the OP almost wonder why they bothered researching it), then the experiment would replicate. Conversely, if the result was really “interesting” (as in surprising or unexpected), chances were that it would fail to replicate.

I guess that isn’t so surprising as most of us deal with people constantly and so our intuitive understanding of human psychology is actually pretty good.

But it does prove the value of constructing the scientific theory painstakingly and carefully out of tiny claims rather than trying to do something bombastic.