6

We get a fair few questions from people about what is often called 'popular psychology'. E.g., questions about the MBTI, some questions grounded in self-help books, or other popular psychology books.

  • Would it be useful to have a tag for 'popular-psychology'?
  • What would be its scope?

For example, I was thinking of adding it to this question:

Are there any personality theories that use the scientific method?

2
  • 2
    It's a meta-tag anyway, isn't it? Id addition to Artem's points
    – Zelda
    Commented Aug 16, 2012 at 12:00
  • Yes, I guess so; to some extent.
    – Jeromy Anglim Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2012 at 12:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

  1. I think most of the popular psychology questions detract significantly from the site, thus I am skeptical of having a tag for them.

  2. A lot of the questions that I can imagine in pop-psych are of the demything or "does real research support this" type. These are not a good fit for a scientific site, we already have Skeptics.SE for questions like this.

  3. I think a number of the regular users (myself, for sure) will use/view the tag in a derogatory way and thus it can suffer from many of the shortcomings and controversy that the homework tag faced on exchanges like CS, Physics, Stats, and Math.

  4. I don't think popular-psychology is really all that well defined. Tagging will be difficult, and for me it will mostly be a 'bad question' tag.

1
  • 2
    I think they are some good arguments for not having the tag. The only comment I'd make is that I'm happy to have demything type questions on this site if they relate to psychology or cognitive science. But I agree with your arguments for not needing a specific tag.
    – Jeromy Anglim Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2012 at 12:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .