Psychology Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
Grouped by the expertise recorded on each question, in the words the question itself uses. Most of these are held by a single question.
Showing 21 to 34 of 34 open questions, page 2 of 2.
History of psychology / archival scholarship 1
The Little Albert Experiment
Who was the infant known as Little Albert in Watson and Rayner's 1920 conditioning experiment?
Open The Little Albert Experiment
Why It Is Open Beck and Levinson (2009) identified Little Albert as Douglas Merritte, who died at age 6 of congenital hydrocephalus, but a competing claim by Powell et al. holds he was Albert Barger, arguing Merritte was completely blind, incompatible with the infant's observed behavior in the surviving films.
What Would Settle It Further historical-archival research, medical records verification, or re-analysis of the surviving experimental films against each candidate's documented medical history.
Expertise Needed History of psychology / archival scholarship
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Little Albert experiment, John B. Watson section, Little Albert; and Little Albert experiment article.
Industrial-organizational psychology and applied econometrics 1
Hawthorne Studies
How strong was the original Hawthorne effect, really?
Open Hawthorne Studies
Why It Is Open The term was coined in 1953, two decades after the original studies, from a methodologically loose, largely uncontrolled dataset. A 2011 re-analysis of the original illumination-experiment data by economists Steven Levitt and John List found only slight long-run evidence for the effect, far weaker than its popular retelling, and the psychologist Richard Nisbett has dismissed the whole phenomenon as a glorified anecdote, so how much of the classic story survives contact with the original data is unsettled.
What Would Settle It A full re-analysis of the surviving relay-assembly and bank-wiring datasets, not just the illumination-experiment data Levitt and List examined, using modern statistical controls for the original experiments' many confounds (rest breaks, pay changes, seasonal effects).
Expertise Needed Industrial-organizational psychology and applied econometrics
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Hawthorne Effect.
Philosophy of science and clinical psychology 1
Psychoanalysis
Can psychoanalytic claims about the unconscious be falsified?
Open Psychoanalysis
Why It Is Open Karl Popper argued psychoanalysis lacks scientific rigor because its central claims about instinct, consciousness and memory are constructed so that they cannot be refuted by any possible observation, a criticism aimed specifically at how the theory explains conscious acts after the fact. Psychoanalytic clinicians and researchers dispute this, and empirical studies of psychoanalytic psychotherapy's effectiveness report benefits for some disorders while the field's own overall efficacy remains contested, so whether the core theoretical claims (as opposed to the therapy's outcomes) are testable at all is unsettled.
What Would Settle It A precise, pre-registered operationalization of a specific psychoanalytic mechanism (for example a defense mechanism's predicted behavioral signature) stated in a form that specifies in advance what observation would count against it, then tested.
Expertise Needed Philosophy of science and clinical psychology
Question posed in
Psychoanalysis.
Psychology (Methodology / Meta-Science) 1
Replication Crisis
How much of psychology's published literature will ultimately replicate, and which reforms actually fix the underlying incentives?
Open Replication Crisis
Why It Is Open The 2015 Reproducibility Project measured a 36 percent replication rate for one sample of 97 findings, but researchers still debate how representative that sample is, how to interpret a "failed" replication, and whether reforms such as pre-registration are sufficient to change publication incentives.
What Would Settle It Sustained tracking of replication rates across psychology's subfields after widespread adoption of pre-registration and open data, compared against pre-reform baselines.
Expertise Needed Psychology (Methodology / Meta-Science)
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Replication crisis, Remedies.
Psychometrics and social cognition 1
Implicit Association Test Studies
Does the Implicit Association Test measure a stable trait or situational noise?
Open Implicit Association Test Studies
Why It Is Open Individual Implicit Association Test scores show only middling test-retest reliability, around 0.60, and researchers dispute whether the test measures a stable automatic association, widely shared cultural knowledge regardless of the test-taker's own attitude, or the momentary salience of certain attributes, with a meta-analysis by Oswald and colleagues finding implicit measures only weakly predictive of actual discriminatory behavior and no better than explicit self-report at predicting it.
What Would Settle It Converging physiological, behavioral and longitudinal measures of the same individuals over time, isolating how much variation in IAT score reflects a stable trait versus test-retest noise or momentary situational context.
Expertise Needed Psychometrics and social cognition
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Implicit-Association Test.
Social psychology / cross-cultural psychology 1
Asch's Conformity Experiments
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?
Open Asch's Conformity Experiments
Why It Is Open Perrin and Spencer's 1980 British replication found conformity had nearly vanished (one join in 396 trials), arguing the Asch effect was a child of its time. Bond and Smith's 1996 meta-analysis further found conformity rates differ across cultures and genders, with collectivist cultures showing higher rates than individualist ones.
What Would Settle It Systematic cross-cultural and cross-era replication with standardized methodology, isolating cultural-moment effects from a stable underlying conformity mechanism.
Expertise Needed Social psychology / cross-cultural psychology
Question posed in
SimplyPsychology: Asch Conformity, Perrin and Spencer 1980/1981; Bond and Smith 1996.
Social psychology and research ethics 1
Robbers Cave Experiment
Were the Robbers Cave experimenters themselves an uncontrolled third group?
Open Robbers Cave Experiment
Why It Is Open Some boys in the wider study series ganged up on the experimenters themselves, showing an awareness of being manipulated, and the social psychologist Michael Billig has argued the experimenters constituted a third group, and arguably the most powerful one, deliberately engineering the friction and later the reconciliation rather than passively observing it. If so, how much of the realistic-conflict-theory result reflects the boys' own group dynamics versus the experimenters' own stage-managing is unresolved by the study's own design.
What Would Settle It A close reading of the original unpublished field notes and staff journals against a blind coding of which specific incidents were spontaneous versus staff-engineered, which no published replication of Robbers Cave-style summer-camp design has attempted at this scale.
Expertise Needed Social psychology and research ethics
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Robbers Cave Experiment.
Social psychology, research methodology, and the history of science. 1
Stanford Prison Experiment
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?
Open Stanford Prison Experiment
Why It Is Open Zimbardo's own recordings and instructions to guards, later examined by historian Thibault Le Texier through the Stanford archives, show guards were directly coached toward the study's expected conclusions before the results were interpreted as a spontaneous emergent effect; the original study also had no control condition and was never formally peer reviewed, making it difficult to separate genuine situational influence from guided performance.
What Would Settle It A controlled replication with genuinely blind, uncoached participant instructions and pre-registered analysis, which the ethical concerns the original study itself raised make difficult to conduct today.
Expertise Needed Social psychology, research methodology, and the history of science.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Stanford prison experiment, Critiques of scientific validity section.
Not Yet Classified 6
Cognitive Load Theory
Can the three types of cognitive load (intrinsic, extraneous and germane) be reliably measured and empirically distinguished from one another?
Open Cognitive Load Theory
Why It Is Open Cognitive load theory names three distinct types of load, but researchers using self-report, physiological and performance-based measures have not converged on a way to isolate them from one another, and some findings suggest the three may not be additively separable in practice.
What Would Settle It A validated measurement method, independently confirmed across labs, capable of isolating intrinsic, extraneous and germane load from one another in the same learning task.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Cognitive Load, Measurement section.
Attachment Theory
Are Ainsworth's Strange Situation attachment classifications culturally universal, or do they reflect Western caregiving norms?
Open Attachment Theory
Why It Is Open Attachment theory's secure/insecure classifications were developed and normed on a Western, mostly American middle-class sample, and the social milieux and caregiving arrangements the theory assumes vary widely across cultures, so it remains disputed whether the same classifications and their developmental meaning transfer to societies with different childrearing practices.
What Would Settle It Attachment measures independently developed and validated within non-Western caregiving contexts, compared against the Strange Situation's own classifications and outcomes.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Attachment Theory, Cultural differences section.
Psychometrics
Does Spearman's g reflect a genuine unitary cognitive ability, or is it a statistical artifact of overlapping mental processes?
Open Psychometrics
Why It Is Open Spearman's own model of a single general factor and rival sampling-theory models, which explain the same positive correlations among test scores as an artifact of overlapping mental processes rather than one underlying capacity, are statistically indistinguishable from the correlational data alone.
What Would Settle It Evidence that does not depend on the same correlational test-score structure both rival models already fit equally well, for example converging biological or neurological findings for a single general capacity distinct from a bundle of overlapping specific processes.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: G Factor (Psychometrics), On the debate section.
Selective Perception
In what year was selective perception first identified or named as a distinct concept in psychology?
Open Selective Perception
Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article traces the concept only to Gestalt psychology in the early 20th century and says it attracted more scholarly attention in the mid 20th century, naming Leon Festinger 1957 cognitive dissonance theory as a later explanatory milestone, but it gives no specific year for when selective perception itself was first described or named.
What Would Settle It A citable primary source, textbook, or history-of-psychology reference naming the specific year or publication that first used or defined the term selective perception.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Selective perception, Wikipedia: Selective perception, History section.
Zero-Risk Bias
In what year was zero-risk bias first described or named as a distinct concept?
Open Zero-Risk Bias
Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article cites Baron, Gowda and Kunreuther (1993) and Viscusi, Magat and Huber (1987) as early studies documenting the effect, and an economics study by Kunreuther (1991), but does not state in what year the bias itself was first named or described, and the 1987 study title does not use the term.
What Would Settle It A citable source naming the specific year or publication where the term zero-risk bias was first coined.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Zero-risk bias, Wikipedia: Zero-risk bias, Explanation section.
Present Bias
In what year was the term present bias first introduced?
Open Present Bias
Why It Is Open The cited Wikipedia article states only that the term was not introduced until the 1950s and separately notes that Phelps and Pollak introduced the quasi-hyperbolic model in 1968, without giving a specific year or publication for when present bias itself was first named.
What Would Settle It A citable source naming the specific year and publication that first used the term present bias.
Question posed in
Wikipedia: Present bias, Wikipedia: Present bias, History section.