This may be the place to make an observation which is still growing in me, so I can only state it in a very preliminary way for now. The great historical precursor is to be found in the psychoanalytic subculture which sprung up after Freud, with all its competing schools. Two facts stand out: these people believed that they understood the human mind, and their theories shaped their interactions with each other. (As when one school's rejection of the theories of another was itself explained psychoanalytically.)
There are new conceptions of human nature springing up from genetics, neuroscience, and cognitive science, and these conceptions are spreading into the culture at large. The most prominent vector for the spread of these ideas is the mass media. But enthusiast online communities like this one are going to be far more demonstrative of the social and psychological effects which result from taking these new ideas utterly to heart.
Two other examples come to mind. There is a sub-blogosphere focused on a particular conception of male and female psychology, centered on the blogger Roissy, which owes a lot to evolutionary psychology. And there is another sub-blogosphere focused on a new racial politics, centered on the blogger Steve Sailer, which owes a lot to human genomics. Together with the bias/rationality focus found here and at Overcoming Bias, these blog communities are not just an exercise in trying to assimilate new discoveries and live their implications, they are themselves little sociological case studies in the impact of science on human subjectivity, individually and collectively.
Now beyond sounding generic warnings about the lesson of history, that people have repeatedly thought that they had things figured out, when they didn't; and reminding everyone of the skeptical abyss which exists beneath almost all assertions of what is so; I do not really have a way to inoculate you against the errors that come from embracing your favorite paradigm, whatever it is. This post gave me an opportunity to sound the alarm only because it exposes just one of the ways whereby that which is taken to be new knowledge, hereabouts, may not be knowledge at all. I suppose one principle is to keep an eye on whatever part of the culture you think epitomizes the old beliefs, the old way of thinking that has been superseded, because if anyone will escape whatever pathologies accompany the embrace of the new, if anyone knows things that you cannot believe to be true because of what you "know", it's going to be Them, the Opposition, whoever they may be. And specifically with respect to evolutionary psychology, just to throw an opposite perspective into the ring, I'm going to mention Jeremy Griffith, a totally obscure Australian thinker who puts the biohistorical perspective on human cognition and human values to a completely different use than anyone else. He has his own problems as a thinker, but perhaps he can be a corrective to some of the excesses of the ev-psych outlook.
In the end, though, I guess we have no choice but to endure whatever downsides accompany the outlooks we choose, if we really do insist on holding those outlooks. So, pointless best wishes to us all, as we suffer the travails of inevitable cause and effect. :-)
There is a sub-blogosphere focused on a particular conception of male and female psychology, centered on the blogger Roissy, which owes a lot to evolutionary psychology.
I'm a big fan of evolutionary psychology, including practical applications of it. Roissy makes a good start attempting to apply it, but he falls prey to major ideological errors, overgeneralization, and oversimplification. I see no evidence that he has read more than a few popular books on the subject. He has made the discovery that even naive applications of evolutionary psychology can ...
Most of the research on cognitive biases and other psychological phenomena that we draw on here is based on samples of students at US universities. To what extent are we uncovering human universals, and to what extent facts about these WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) sample sources? A paper in press in Behavioural and Brain Sciences the evidence from studies that reach outside this group and highlights the many instances in which US students are outliers for many crucial studies in behavioural economics.
Epiphenom: How normal is WEIRD?
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (in press). The Weirdest people in the world? (PDF) Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. Are such species-generalizing claims justified? This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self‐concepts. This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address these challenges.