I thought I could call it the "confirmation crisis" but when I looked up those words as a search term, I didn't find what I was looking for. I added "in psychology" and discovered that what I was thinking of is being called the "replication crisis".
I am a longtime fan of people, their minds, motivations, and impulses. I had grad school minors in psychology and in philosophy. I had taught the 5th grade for four years before entering grad school. I knew from experience that old-time observers of humans, such as the Bible and Shakespeare, and more recents like C.S.Lewis and Jacques Barzun knew a great deal about the way humans think, act and feel. I enjoyed my philosophy courses more than the psych ones, although psychophysics, the study of the human senses, was quite interesting.
I remember seeing a list, I think compiled by Carl Rogers, of 50 truths about humans that were supposedly uncovered by psych researchers. One related to the experiments where several conspirators announced that line A looked longer than line B and gosh, the experimental subject agreed even though it wasn't. I imagined a minute of conversation with that person just before the event, explaining what was going to happen. I thought a minute would be enough to undo this fundamental law. We all know about peer pressure, crowd effects, social pressures and such.
Given the value of knowing oneself and others, the steady contact and company of others, the inner secrets one knows about oneself and the ability to infer similar wiring in others, it is difficult to uncover
New and useful
Exciting
Reliable
truths about people. New ideas may not hold up, or they aren't new or they only apply on Tuesday after 7 PM for blondes.
It's old news that people are tricky and can modify themselves and their behavior. That is so true that many thinkers have warned that the physical world and its rules are quite different from the human world. There is interaction between the two, sure, and one depends on the other. Still, as football teams know, if we can rely on steady, fixed repetition, we humans can often find a way to bend the rules, modify the setting or its meaning or cheat.
