Mentalities and mind-sets : the skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Abstract

Over its brief history, the discipline of psychology has seen its fair share of crises (Farr, 1991). In the grand scheme of academic scholarship, it has sandwiched itself between the natural and the social sciences. This positioning, in itself, has fuelled fierce as well as productive debates concerning the discipline’s scope, its phenomenology, epistemology, and methodology (see Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The latest crisis to afflict the discipline is the infamous ‘replication crisis’, precipitated by the Reproducibility Project which claimed that it was only able to find evidence for successful replication of published psychological findings in 47% of cases (i.e. less than chance, or 50%).