BPS Core Textbooks Series

Developed in collaboration with the British Psychological Society

Chapter 36 – Train Wreck Looming: Conceptual and Historical Issues and the Crisis in Psychology

Chapter Summary

This chapter examines five interlinked crises confronting psychology: the replication crisis, the ethical crisis, the W.E.I.R.D. crisis, the ecological crisis, and the legacy crisis. Each represents a challenge to the discipline’s assumptions about how knowledge is produced, whose knowledge counts, and how psychology engages with power, history, and the planet. Far from being isolated problems, these crises reveal a discipline grappling with the consequences of its own epistemologies, ontologies, and entanglements with power. Drawing on key themes from throughout this textbook, each crisis is paired with a critical thinking tool: epistemic resilience, reflexivity, situated knowledge, the looping effect, and critical historiography. Together, these offer not just a diagnosis of psychology’s predicament but a toolkit for renewal. The chapter concludes that psychology does not study timeless natural laws but human kinds, reflexive, historically contingent, and shaped by culture, language, and power. This is not psychology’s weakness but its defining power. Psychology’s categories do not merely describe the world; they help create it. The chapter concludes on an optimistic note.

Chapter 36 – Quiz

  • Chapter 36 – Flashcards

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  • Chapter 36 – Key Readings

    Boynton, D. M., & Smith, L. D. (2006). Bringing history to life: Simulating landmark experiments in psychology. History of Psychology, 9(2), 113–143. https://doi.org/10.1037/1093-4510.9.2.113 

    Broere, S. (2019). Picturing ethnopsychology: A colonial psychiatrist’s struggles to examine Javanese minds, 1910–1925. History of Psychology, 22(3), 266–286. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000094 

    De Vos, J. (2011). Depsychologizing Torture. Critical Inquiry, 37(2), 286–314. https://doi.org/10.1086/657294 

    Di Castri, T. (2023). The settler colonial roots and neoliberal afterlife of Problem Behaviour Theory. Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 59(2), 107–128. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22218 

    Drumm, P. (2018). Australian fantasy revisited. History of Psychology, 21(3), 295–296. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000099 

    Fisher, A., & Abram, D. (2013). Radical ecopsychology: psychology in the service of life (2nd edition). SUNY Press. 

    Henrich, J. P. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Picador: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

    Lazard, L. & McAvoy, J. (2020). Doing reflexivity in psychological research: What’s the point? What’s the practice?, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17(2), 159-177, https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2017.1400144 

    Leys, R. (2024). Anatomy of a train wreck: The rise and fall of priming research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

    Moghaddam, F. M. (2023). How psychologists failed: we neglected the poor and minorities, favored the rich and privileged, and got science wrong. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071598 

    Morawski, J. (2020). Psychologists’ psychologies of psychologists in a time of crisis. History of Psychology, 23(2), 176–198. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000140 

    Pickren, G. W., Pickren, W. E. (2021). Signposts to decolonial futures in understanding and addressing our present crises. Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 57(4), 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22147 

    Pols, H. (2007). Psychological knowledge in a colonial context: Theories on the nature of the “native mind” in the former Dutch East Indies. History of Psychology, 10(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/1093-4510.10.2.111 

    Sturm, T., & Mülberger, A. (2012). Crisis discussions in psychology: New historical and philosophical perspectives. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43(2), 425–433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.11.001

  • Chapter 36 – Reflective Questions

    1. How did the replication crisis reveal deeper epistemological flaws in psychology, beyond just methodological errors? 
    2. In what ways does the ethical crisis show that psychology has been complicit with systems of power, rather than independent of them? 
    3. What does the W.E.I.R.D. crisis tell us about the limitations of psychology’s claim to universality? 
    4. Why is the ecological crisis described as an ontological crisis, and how does the looping effect help explain psychology’s role in it? 
    5. How does the legacy crisis demand a shift towards critical historiography, and what does this mean for how psychology understands itself?

  • Chapter 36 – Weblinks

    The Open Science Framework (OSF)

    https://osf.io

    This site is the central platform for the Open Science movement, giving students the ability to look at their tools for preregistration, data sharing and data replication. This is an excellent resource for students wanting to explore the replication crisis and ideas of epistemic resilience.

    Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (Educational Resource)

    https://decolonialfutures.net

    This site contains a vast amount of resources exploring the intersections of psychology, colonialism, ecological collapse and radical hope, which is highly relevant to the ecological crisis section of this chapter.

    PsyArXiv – Open Psychology Reprint Repository

    https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv

    Linking with the concepts being the OSF, PsyArXiv is a preprint archive for psychological research, aiming to exemplify the Open Science reforms discussed alongside the replication crisis and epistemic resilience.

    Report of the Independent Reviewer and Related Materials – American Psychological Association (Academic Report)

    https://www.apa.org/independent-review/index

    This page contains the full report into APA’s involvement with torture programmes, providing students with direct material for students studying the ethical crisis, and encouraging engagement with ongoing developments into the way that these organisations approach research.

    Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | Talks at Google (YouTube Lecture)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjVQJdIrDJ0

    This 1-hour TEDTalk-style lecture by Kahneman discusses his System 1 and System 2 frameworks for the ways that people think, giving students an accessible and engaging look into a style of analysis that they may not have encountered before looking at this chapter.