Somehow the irony seems to have escaped you that you've based your opinion on a entire field of study on an anecdote about overhearing one conversation while you're deriding them for not being "scientific" enough.
At this point, I suspect that the majority of published results in any field cannot be replicated. A certain number of the ones that get a great deal of publicity[1] don't seem to pass a sniff test.
I have sat in this cafe for years, and have listened to some large fraction of the psychology department (and part of the economics department, as well as Robert Reich) discussing "how to get the 'right answer.'" That is a statistically significant sample, particularly considering ... Cal ain't exactly a cow college. Psychology as a field is baloney, as worthy of respect as the astrology column. What the "self esteem expert" in this article was discussing is even more execrable baloney than the usual.
I can't believe that I have to explain to an allegedly working scientist that a sample of professors who happen to frequent one cafe, at one university, is not statistically significant.
What is your position then? That nothing can be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method? That there's no inherent patterns or cause and effect behind how humans act? Or just that not one single psychologist in the history of the field has yet successfully performed an experiment that has demonstrated such, or even made an attempt in good faith to do so?
Certainly, it's much harder to remove all confounding variables from psychological experiments. That doesn't mean that there's nothing to be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method.
