Open Questions

Groups the atlas's recorded open questions, points where the field's own research is genuinely unsettled, such as unresolved debates between rival schools or a gap a landmark study left unanswered. The grouping comes from the open question type rather than from any subcategory tree, since an open question is tied to the specific subject it questions rather than to a branch of its own. It deliberately excludes settled findings the field treats as established, recorded as ordinary facts on the subject's own entity instead of as an open question.

Open Questions

Are Ainsworth's Strange Situation attachment classifications culturally universal, or do they reflect Western caregiving norms?

Can psychoanalytic claims about the unconscious be falsified?

Can the three types of cognitive load (intrinsic, extraneous and germane) be reliably measured and empirically distinguished from one another?

Did all eight of the pseudopatients David Rosenhan described in his 1973 "On Being Sane in Insane Places" study genuinely exist and undergo the hospitalizations as published?

Did Chomsky's critique alone cause the cognitive revolution?

Did later attempts to replicate the Rat Park experiment support Alexander's original findings?

Did later studies replicate Rosenthal and Jacobson's original Pygmalion in the Classroom effect?

Did the Stanford Prison Experiment reveal a genuine, spontaneous psychological effect of institutional roles, or did the guards' abusive behavior result substantially from Philip Zimbardo's own coaching and demand characteristics rather than emerging naturally from the prison situation itself?

Do existential therapy approaches produce measurable clinical benefit, or does the evidence differ sharply by which existential tradition is being tested?

Do intrinsic, extraneous and germane load measure genuinely distinct constructs?

Does Maslow's hierarchy of needs reflect a genuinely universal structure of human motivation, or is it culturally specific to individualistic Western societies?

Does positive psychology's model of human flourishing generalize beyond individualistic Western societies, or does it primarily reflect a culturally specific view of well-being?

Does Spearman's g reflect a genuine unitary cognitive ability, or is it a statistical artifact of overlapping mental processes?

Does the Asch conformity effect reflect a durable feature of human group behavior, or was it substantially a product of the cultural moment (1950s America) in which it was measured?

Does the Implicit Association Test measure a stable trait or situational noise?

How much of psychology's published literature will ultimately replicate, and which reforms actually fix the underlying incentives?

How strong was the original Hawthorne effect, really?

In what specific year did Richard C. Schwartz first develop the Internal Family Systems Model?

In what specific year should narrative therapy's founding be dated: 1983, when Michael White established the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, or 1990, when White and David Epston published Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, the book that brought the approach to wide attention?

In what specific year should psychosynthesis's founding be dated: 1910, when Roberto Assagioli began formulating the ideas, or 1927, when he first published them as a named system in the pamphlet A New Method of Healing: Psychosynthesis?

In what year did Jeffrey E. Young first formulate schema therapy as a distinct approach?

In what year was automation bias first identified or named as a distinct phenomenon in human factors research?

In what year was intentionality bias first described or named in the psychology literature?

In what year was selective perception first identified or named as a distinct concept in psychology?

In what year was the default effect first described or named in the psychology or behavioral-economics literature?

In what year was the not invented here phenomenon first identified or named in management or organizational research?

In what year was the overconfidence effect first identified or named as a distinct phenomenon in the psychological literature?

In what year was the term present bias first introduced?

In what year was zero-risk bias first described or named as a distinct concept?

Is Carl Jung's well-known paranoid-schizophrenic patient case, which he used as evidence for the collective unconscious, authentic as reported?

Were the Robbers Cave experimenters themselves an uncontrolled third group?

Which child was actually filmed as "Little Albert" in Watson and Rayner's 1920 conditioning experiment?

Who was the infant known as Little Albert in Watson and Rayner's 1920 conditioning experiment?

Why did facilitated communication persist for years after it was discredited?