(2) Scope

17-7-2017

The scope of the site determines which groups of experts we do and don't want to include. Obvious on-topic topics are psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and statistical, programming-related and methodological variants of them. A couple of less clear topics were discussed:

• Sociology: Sociology is different from social psychology. It concerns specific cultures, and is less about generalisable human behavior. Two meta-post already exist [1][2]. This answer appeared to be a popular point of view.

• Anthropology: Typical anthropology is typically seen as History. However, there are some psychological interesting anthropology questions.

• Hypnosis: This topic was also mentioned briefly. It appears to gain some traction in Psychology. No decisions or proposals were made.

• Freud et al. : Freud is by many argued to be pseudoscience, and only interesting from a historical perspective (e.g. [3][4]). However, it is argued that Freud is still very common in psychology and psychotherapy. Closing these questions as off-topic would scare away people who use it actively in the field. There seems to be consensus to just answer the questions with current scientific theories, to confirm or dismiss Freudian theories (and theories with a similar reputation).

• Neuroscience (methodology): A while ago a Neuroscience SE was created in Area51. We wanted to include them (and everybody agreed we should include them) but they did not want to include our topics (psychology and other behavior related questions). This is an example where question quality may have played a role.