A draft article due to appear in APS Observer caused widespread outrage this week. Susan Fiske, the former president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), writes that bloggers and other online critics of psychology papers are running wild:
New media (e.g., blogs, twitter, Facebook posts) are encouraging uncurated, unfiltered trash-talk. In the most extreme examples, online vigilantes are attacking individuals, their research programs, and their careers. Self-appointed data police are volunteering critiques of such personal ferocity and relentless frequency that they resemble a denial-of-service attack that crashes a website by sheer volume of traffic.
Fiske goes on to call critics "bullies", "destructo-critics" and, most notoriously, practioners of "methodological terrorism." She says that these offenders "destroy lives" because they "attack the person, not just the work" and that "our colleagues at all career stages are leaving the field because of the sheer adversarial viciousness." Now, many people have responded to ...
