Open Questions

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.

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.

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.

Open The Little Albert Experiment

Why It Is Open Two independent historical investigations identify two different children from incompatible hospital records -- Douglas Merritte (Beck, Levinson and Irons, 2009) and Albert Barger (Powell, Digdon, Harris and Smithson, 2014) -- and neither identification has been conclusively confirmed against the surviving film and case notes.

What Would Settle It Additional archival or genetic evidence definitively linking the surviving film footage to one specific infant's hospital record.

Expertise Needed History of Psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Little Albert experiment, Douglas Merritte; Albert Barger.

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.

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.

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.

Open Facilitated Communication Studies

Why It Is Open Despite more than fifty controlled studies by 2005 showing facilitators, not the person being facilitated, controlled the typed messages, and the American Psychological Association stating in 1994 there was no scientifically demonstrated support for the technique, some practitioners and family members continued to use and defend it for years afterward. The sources consulted here do not settle how much of that persistence reflects genuine belief formed from specific favorable cases versus institutional and emotional investment that made abandoning the technique difficult.

What Would Settle It A study of practitioner and family decision-making that traces why individual cases and institutions continued after the aggregate controlled evidence became clear, rather than only re-testing whether the technique itself produces authentic communication.

Expertise Needed History and sociology of science, clinical psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Facilitated Communication.

Open Rosenhan Experiment

Why It Is Open Susannah Cahalan's 2019 archival investigation (The Great Pretender) could confirm only two of the eight claimed pseudopatients, Rosenhan himself and one graduate student whose own account allegedly conflicts with the published article, and found other inconsistencies and apparently fabricated quotations in Rosenhan's papers.

What Would Settle It Identification and independent corroboration (hospital admission records, first-person testimony) of the six remaining pseudopatients Rosenhan claimed but never named.

Expertise Needed History of Psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Rosenhan Experiment, Accusation of fraud section.

Open Collective Unconscious

Why It Is Open Historian and Jung critic Richard Noll has argued against the authenticity of this case, which remains a contested piece of evidence Jung offered for archetypal patterns appearing independent of a patient's personal exposure to the source material.

What Would Settle It Independent archival verification of Jung's original case notes and contemporaneous records against his published account.

Expertise Needed History of psychiatry / archival scholarship

Question posed in Collective unconscious, Collective unconscious article, critique section.

Open Hierarchy of Needs

Why It Is Open Critics note the needs and drives of those in individualistic societies tend to be more self-centered than those in collectivist societies, and a 1976 review found little evidence for the theory's specific ranking of needs, undermining its claim to universality.

What Would Settle It Controlled cross-cultural studies directly testing whether need-priority sequencing holds across individualist and collectivist societies.

Expertise Needed Cross-cultural psychology

Question posed in Maslow%27s hierarchy of needs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs article, Criticism section.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Open Cognitive Load Theory

Why It Is Open A 2008 study found that three commonly used measures of cognitive load responded differently to intrinsic, extraneous and germane load, and researchers have separately proposed an additivity hypothesis under which the three load types overlap substantially rather than staying cleanly distinct, so the theory's own three-way split has not been settled as measurably separable.

What Would Settle It Converging physiological, behavioral and self-report measures of cognitive load that agree with one another across instructional conditions designed to isolate each load type in turn.

Expertise Needed Educational psychology and psychometrics

Question posed in Wikipedia: Cognitive Load.

Open Positive Psychology

Why It Is Open Positive psychology has been criticized for underrepresenting non-Western perspectives and for accessibility limitations in its research base, raising doubt about whether its account of well-being and flourishing holds outside the individualistic Western societies where most of its research was conducted.

What Would Settle It Controlled cross-cultural studies testing whether positive psychology's well-being interventions and flourishing constructs replicate in collectivist and non-Western contexts.

Expertise Needed Cross-cultural psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Positive Psychology.

Open Existential Psychology

Why It Is Open Outcome studies find meaning-centered existential therapies improve life meaning and moderately reduce psychopathology, while experiential-existential and cognitive-existential approaches show no significant effects in the same research base, leaving open which existential tradition, if any, is reliably effective in the clinic.

What Would Settle It Head-to-head randomized outcome trials comparing the distinct existential therapy traditions, logotherapy, daseinsanalysis, experiential-existential and cognitive-existential, against each other and against established treatments.

Expertise Needed Clinical psychology and psychotherapy outcome research

Question posed in Wikipedia: Existential Therapy.

Open Cognitivism

Why It Is Open Histories of psychology commonly credit Noam Chomsky's critique of B.F. Skinner's behaviorist account of language acquisition as the decisive blow that opened the field to cognitivism, but that critique arrived alongside independent pressures from early computing (the mind-as-information-processor analogy) and from Ulric Neisser's own program-building work, and the sources consulted here do not weigh these causes against one another.

What Would Settle It A historiographical study tracing citation and hiring patterns across psychology, linguistics and early computer science departments through the 1950s and 1960s, to test whether the shift away from behaviorism tracks the Chomsky critique specifically or the broader cross-disciplinary move.

Expertise Needed History and philosophy of science

Question posed in Wikipedia: Cognitivism (Psychology).

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.