Social scientists are experts at having an explanation for the results, no matter how they come out, so long as they are statistically significant. It is easy to turn the statistical crank. With sufficiently powerful statistical tools, you can find a significant statistical relationship between just about anything and anything else.

Psychologists see no real problem with the current dogma. They are used to getting messy results that can be dealt with only by statistics. In fact, I have now detected a positive suspicion of quality results amongst psychologists. In my experiments I get relationships between variables that are predictable to within 1 percent accuracy. The response to this level of perfection has been that the results must be trivial! It was even suggested to me that I use procedures that would reduce the quality of the results, the implication being that noisier data would mean more.

After some recovery period I realized that this attitude is to be expected from anyone trying to see the failure of the input-output model as a success. Social scientists are used to accounting for perhaps 80% (at most) of the variance in their data. They then look for other variables that will account for more variance. This is what gives them future research studies. The premise is that behavior is caused by many variables. If I account for all the variance with just one variable, it’s no fun and seems trivial.

If psychologists had been around at the time that physics was getting started, we’d still be Aristotelian, or worse. There would be many studies looking for relationships between one physical variable and another—e.g., between ball color and rate of fall, or between type of surface and the amount of snow in the driveway. Some of these relationships would prove statistically significant. Then when some guy comes along and shows that there is a nearly perfect linear relationship between distance traveled and acceleration, there would be a big heave of “trivial” or “too limited”—what does this have to do with the problems we have keeping snow out of the driveway?

Few psychologists recognize that, whatever their theory, it is based on the open-loop input-output model. There is no realization that the very methods by which data are collected imply that you are dealing with an open-loop system. To most psychologists, the methods of doing research are simply the scientific method—the only alternative is superstition. There is certainly no realization that the input-output model is testable and could be shown to be false. In fact, the methods are borrowed, in caricature, from the natural sciences, where the open-loop model works very well, thank you. Progress in the natural sciences began dramatically when it was realized that the inanimate world is not purposive.

Psychologists have mistakenly applied this model of the inanimate world to the animate world, where it simply does not apply.

This was a forgivable mistake in the days before control theory, because before 1948 there was no understanding of how purposive behavior could work. Now we know, but the social sciences have their feet sunk in conceptual concrete. They simply won’t give up what, to them, simply means science.

• Richard Marken in a May 15, 1985 lecture titled "Teaching Dogma in Psychology"

The author was transformed by reading "Behavior: The Control of Perception"(1973) and began a research program whose early years(?) seem to have been summarized in "Mind Readings: Experimental Studies of Purpose"(1992)