[Don Salmon]

Speaking as a psychologist trained in research, my estimation of the value of psychological research has declined over the years, plummeting in 2011 during the infamous “replication crisis” – when it was found that almost all of the foundational research on which psychological science was built over a century was practically worthless, unable to be replicated.

this link to differences in female vs male friendships is particularly embarrassing to me as a psychologist. if you asked even the most mediocre historian, they’d be able to easily pick this completely apart. Look at what the study focuses on – a quantifiable measure of intimacy (the very phrase is utterly incoherent – measures of intimacy – as if closeness was something you measure like friction in an automobile engine). Also, it takes one historical period (not even a whole period but one snapshot in time) in one culture.

If you just go back about 150 years, and look at male correspondence, compared to many if not most contemporary female friendships you’d find a level of intimacy far greater in the correspondence. We are so conditioned by our current experience we just “feel” that this can’t be so, the way we see things now in our little moment of history must be the way it’s always been.

Owen Barfield makes the point that “matter” as we experience it didn’t even come into existence until less than three thousand years ago. Our psychological science is going to most assuredly, as far as I can see, give way to a real science (one infinitely more profound than even the greatest physics we have nowadays)>

But I suspect that’s still some centuries off – probably by the time our whole sense of years, decades, centuries, etc will have so profoundly shifted it will not in any way resemble what we take to be “time” …..now….