Psycho-Orthodoxy

The established, institutionalized set of beliefs that dominate mainstream psychology—the often-unexamined assumptions about how to study mind, what counts as psychological knowledge, what methods are valid, and what theories are acceptable. Psycho-orthodoxy includes commitments: that quantitative methods are superior, that laboratory experiments reveal psychological truth, that statistical significance matters more than effect size, that Western populations represent humanity, that individual behavior is the right level of analysis, that psychological findings are universal, that replication crises are methodological rather than theoretical. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for psychological research, but it functions as gatekeeping—determining what research is published, what theories are taught, who gets tenure, and what questions are worth asking. Psycho-orthodoxy shapes not just what we know about mind but what we think it's possible to know, making certain approaches feel scientific and others "soft" or "unscientific."

Example: "Her qualitative research on lived experience was rejected as 'not real psychology'—psycho-orthodoxy, where method defines the field rather than questions. The orthodoxy's power is making its preferences feel like standards."

by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026