Synthesis — Psychology

The evolving thesis. Spun out of the hub _inbox on 2026-07-28 from three sources parked under two tags across three weeks: jung-on-creativity (psychology-creativity, 2026-07-23), human-mouse-perceptual-maps (neuroscience, 2026-07-12), and kahneman-focusing-illusion — the trigger.

Current thesis

The mind runs on structure its owner didn’t choose and can’t inspect. Three sources from three incompatible traditions make the same claim about different layers:

• Attention. What you’re looking at inflates its own importance, so a judgment partly reports the shape of the question rather than the world (focusing-illusion).
• Perception. A listener sorts sounds using an internal map that was largely in place before any training, and shows up in mice too (perceptual-learning).
• Creation. The artist is an instrument of material arriving from a layer they don’t author (analytical-psychology).

Stated plainly, that’s the discipline’s oldest idea and the reason it needed to become empirical: introspection is being used to study the thing that introspection can’t see.

The founding tension — three standards of evidence

The corpus is a method spectrum, and it was assembled by accident, which makes it useful:

The claims get more interesting and less checkable in the same direction. That is the spoke’s standing caution — not that Jung is worthless or that psychophysics is the only real psychology, but that a claim’s reach and its evidence tend to trade against each other here, and a source’s prominence tracks neither.

Amended 2026-07-29 — “clinical” is not a position on this spectrum. Four therapy books arrived together and broke the ordering. Hollis and Yalom sit where the table predicts, at the interpretive end with Jung: rich frameworks, no measurement attached, and none possible without changing the method. Hayes sits at the opposite end of the whole corpus — ACT carries over 900 randomized controlled trials, WHO distribution, and APA and VA recognition, which is a larger evidence base than human-mouse-perceptual-maps, the spoke’s only experiment. All three are clinicians treating patients.

So the spectrum’s third row was mislabelled. It was never measuring clinical work; it was measuring a particular tradition’s relationship to testing. Depth psychology declines the question, behaviour analysis builds its programme around it, and both are practised in a consulting room. The corpus assumed one axis and had two: what a source is about, and whether its tradition thinks evidence is the point.

The caution survives in better form. burnout-stress-cycle is the demonstration: a trade paperback making confident physiological claims with thin citation, shelved next to a trade paperback whose therapy has 900 trials behind it and which mentions none of them. Reach and evidence still trade against each other — but not at the level of the discipline, at the level of the book.

Sharpened again the same day (dopamine-nation). Lembke is a Stanford professor of psychiatry, medical director of an addiction medicine programme, author of 100+ peer-reviewed papers on the literature her bestseller compresses. She sits at no untested end of anything. The criticism — documented, unlike for the other four books — is that the trade book outran the work: the pleasure-pain seesaw is tidier than the neuroscience, “dopamine fasting” names a thing you cannot do to a neurotransmitter, the implied recovery timescale is days where the literature says weeks, and the anti-dopamine framing carried into territory (ADHD medication, abstinence versus medication-assisted treatment) with clinical consequences its author then walked back in a newspaper.

So the variable is register, not discipline, tradition, or credential. The same author can produce a peer-reviewed finding and a bestseller whose claims their own field disputes, and it is the second that a million people act on. This is the wiki’s founding note — psychology has a replication problem and popular writing about it compounds one — with both steps visible inside one career. It also sets the corpus’s sharpest evidential contrast: human-mouse-perceptual-maps, one experiment nobody outside the field has heard of, against dopamine-nation, a household phrase whose author has conceded its central simplification.

Both sides counted (the-body-keeps-the-score, 2026-07-29). Van der Kolk’s book is the register problem with numbers attached in place of impressions. Reach: nearly 300 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, 36 languages. Evidence: a 2025 BJPsych Bulletin review that worked through 122 claims and found the two load-bearing ones — trauma-induced brain damage, and the unique efficacy of body-based treatment — unsupported by current research. Every earlier version of this finding on the spoke had a vague quantity on one side; this one has a figure on each.

Two things it adds beyond that arithmetic. The sequence doesn’t close. Lembke conceded her central simplification in a newspaper, and the corpus quietly read that as how the process works: claim, criticism, correction. Van der Kolk received McNally’s critique in 2003, eleven years before the book, and wrote the book anyway; the criticism since has been peer-reviewed and has changed nothing about the readership. Correction was a temperament, not a mechanism. And the criticism names a harm rather than an inaccuracy: readers are steered away from CBT, which has the trials the somatic treatments lack, and Emi Nietfeld’s Mother Jones piece argues the framing stigmatises the survivors it addresses. On burnout-stress-cycle and dopamine-nation the stakes were what a reader might waste effort on. Here they are what a traumatised reader declines.

Determinism, and why the argument is really about blame

Six sources arrived the day after founding, and three of them make the founding thesis explicit rather than implicit. If the mind runs on structure its owner didn’t choose, the obvious next question is whether the owner chooses anything — and free-will is where that lands.

The useful move is splitting the question three ways: whether free will exists (metaphysics, and ../philosophy-wiki’s), what actually produced a given behaviour (Sapolsky’s biology), and what happens to people who stop believing in it (free-will-belief-effects, the only one this corpus can measure — less hatred, more forgiveness, and across 44 countries, weaker free-will belief tracking milder punishment).

What all three are really about is blame. Not agency in the abstract but how harshly to treat people, which is why Sapolsky spends his second half on criminal justice and why Walton measures punitiveness and shame. Determinism enters this wiki as an ethics of treatment.

And the sources arrive already arguing about who owns them. Two of determined‘s four reviewers say a neurobiologist has answered a philosophical question — Riskin calls it scientism, Setiya faults the ignored literature. The routing rule sends them here because the methods are biology and experiment; that decision is contested by the sources themselves, and the contest is recorded rather than settled.

Evidence is a subject here, not just a caution

The founding synthesis treated evidence quality as a caution to apply. Two of the new sources make it a topic: thinking-fast-and-slow‘s own citations fail to replicate (Chapter 4’s replicability index of 14; daniel-kahneman: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”), and free-will-belief-effects uses non-replication as an argument, clearing away the older findings that free-will scepticism increases cheating.

That second use deserves the scrutiny. “It didn’t replicate” is both a legitimate reason to discount a result and a convenient one, and here it is being applied to the opposing literature by an author whose own evidence is two experiments of ~260 participants. replication-crisis holds the general version. The corpus’s method spectrum now has a companion: not just how strong a source’s evidence is, but how it treats everyone else’s.

A third form arrived the same day: the citation chain. why-writing-feels-hard cites Eisenberger, Baumeister, Chen, Raichle, Csikszentmihalyi and Dietrich by name — real work, cited accurately enough that spot-checking any one reference finds a genuine paper. The argument lives in the joins. Eisenberger’s overlap between social and physical pain becomes “your brain… is genuinely convinced that putting words on a page might kill you”; Csikszentmihalyi’s much-repeated 120-bits-per-second is used as a constant; transient hypofrontality is treated as mechanism rather than hypothesis. And the last join is the widest — no cited study is evidence that the practice being sold, ten minutes of insight meditation before writing, does anything for writing.

That’s a harder failure to catch than “studies show,” precisely because the references check out individually. Worth holding as a named pattern: a citation chain terminating in a practice, where each link is real and the load-bearing welds between them are untested. Note also that this spoke’s standing caveat applies from inside the citation list — Baumeister is a central figure in the replication-crisis, which the essay doesn’t mention.

A fourth form, and it is not about weak evidence at all (2026-08-05). dunning-kruger-misread brings an objection the three above have no room for. The 2022 Frontiers in Psychology case against the dunning-kruger-effect is that noisy self-judgments on a bounded scale reproduce the effect’s pattern in data with no effect in it. The result is not fragile. It shows up every time, including when nothing is there.

That breaks the implicit ordering this section had been using, in which evidence gets better as it gets more replicable. Here replication is beside the point: a floor effect plus measurement noise generates a systematic-looking error with no mechanism behind it, and running the study on more people sharpens the artifact rather than exposing it. replication-crisis now carries both — the findings that vanish on re-testing, and the finding that never vanishes and may still be empty.

It also lands on heuristics-and-biases where it hurts most. Systematic rather than random was the claim that turned the programme into a science; a bounded scale supplies systematic direction for free.

A fifth form, and the most ordinary one (2026-08-12). handwriting-vs-typing-notes brings the outcome the four above leave no room for: the finding neither held nor vanished nor turned out to be an artifact. It shrank. Mueller & Oppenheimer’s handwriting advantage survives a 2024 meta-analysis of 24 studies at Hedges’ g = 0.248, while a 2021 direct replication (74 laptop, 68 longhand) and a 2026 EEG study (n=33) each found nothing on immediate testing. Something is there. It is small, and it is conditional on what the test asks for.

This is worth a slot of its own because it is almost certainly the most common fate of a famous result, and the one the corpus is least equipped to notice. A vanished finding makes news. An artifact makes an argument. A finding that comes back at a quarter of a standard deviation makes neither, so the 2014 version keeps circulating unopposed — not because anyone defends it, but because g = 0.248 cannot be said in a headline. Put beside feeling-good‘s cover copy below, the two are the same fault from opposite directions: the register a result gets sold in has no way to express “true and small.”

There is a methodological payoff too. The nulls are only nulls against the popular framing. Read through the mechanism — the constraint on writing speed forces compression, and compression is what the later test rewards — a study measuring immediate recall is measuring before the effect has anywhere to show up. The three studies stop contradicting each other and start describing a boundary condition (note-taking-and-learning).

And the thread has one case running the other way, which is what keeps it from collapsing into “popular psychology is unsupported.”

The one bestseller that was tested

feeling-good breaks the pattern this spoke had started treating as a law. The corpus’s bestsellers arrive with enormous reach and an audit that goes badly afterwards: the-body-keeps-the-score against a 122-claim review, dopamine-nation against its own field, thinking-fast-and-slow against a chapter-level replicability index of 14. Burns’s book sold four million US copies and the studies point the same way — a meta-analysis of six studies finding a large helpful effect for self-directed bibliotherapy, eleven more supporting the guided version, and Scogin et al. (1989) finding it effective for older adults with mild-to-moderate depression.

Note what was tested. Not the theory behind the book, and not a therapy the book describes: reading the book was the intervention. That is the only clean case in this wiki of a popular psychology title being evaluated as the thing it actually is — an object people buy and use alone — rather than being assessed on claims its author made in a different register.

Two limits keep this from being a clean win. The trials are small, several attach therapist contact to the “self-help,” and the professional-recommendation survey dates from 1994. And the jacket outruns all of it: “cured without drugs,” “immediately.” david-d-burns argues that antidepressant research carries drug-favouring biases, which makes the cover copy on his own product the corpus’s sharpest instance of the register problem — a modest true claim sold immodestly, which is a different fault from bessel-van-der-kolk‘s unsupported one and should not be filed as the same thing.

The distortion with no author behind it

Every overreach recorded above has a person at the end of it. Van der Kolk’s unsupported claims, Lembke’s seesaw, Burns’s cover copy, Dávila’s meditation practice — in each case someone stretched a result and put their name on the stretch. The spoke had begun treating that as the shape of the problem.

dunning-kruger-misread is the other shape. The 1999 paper measured self-assessment against performance at one sitting, and the popular version has a time axis, a rise, a collapse and a chart — the “Mount Stupid” curve, which does not appear in the paper. Nobody in the study was followed as they learned; the study everyone describes was not run. The distortion accumulated downstream, in the retelling, and it is now the form in which the finding is known.

This is a distinct failure mode and worth a name of its own: the finding that got away from its authors. The register problem asks whether a claim’s presentation matches its evidence, and assumes a presenter. Here the evidence and the original presentation agree with each other fine, and neither resembles what the public holds. Any popular source in this corpus may be relaying a version like that, and — unlike a jacket promise — there is no author’s overreach to catch it by.

And the first popular source caught relaying the corrected version

The paragraph above closes on a worry: any popular source here may be passing on a runaway version of a finding, with no author’s overreach to catch it by. epictetus-learning-spacedaily (2026-08-09) is the first case in the corpus where that did not happen.

The genre is the one most exposed to it — a daily inspirational column, opening on a quotation, whose whole job is to make an idea feel portable. It states the 1999 result, then gives the correction, citing Eric Gaze in Scientific American: the defensible finding is mostly that most people rate themselves as better than average. No “Mount Stupid,” no confidence curve, no claim about intelligence. That objection is already held here as Krueger and Mueller (2002), so the piece adds a fourth voice rather than new evidence — but it establishes that the corrected version now travels in the same channels the myth does.

One data point, and it does not retire the worry. It does mean this spoke should stop treating genre as a proxy for accuracy, which is what it had begun doing: does-language-determine-thought sits at T4 for citing nobody, and a column of the same weight cites four researchers and a critique. The tier tracks what a piece rests on, not where it appeared.

It also brought a mechanism the corpus was missing. illusion-of-explanatory-depth — via Fisher, Goddu and Keil’s nine Yale experiments (2015), in which searching the internet inflated people’s sense of understanding without changing what they knew. That belongs beside dunning-kruger-effect and is routinely merged with it, wrongly: Dunning-Kruger is about rank, measured once, with nothing done to the participant; this is about depth, and it is inducible on demand. A bias you arrive with and a distortion you can be handed are different objects, and the remedy differs too — the second has a test (explain it without looking anything up), the first does not. Held at one second-hand report; neither Rozenblit and Keil’s original nor the 2015 paper is in the corpus.

The interpretive traditions, and the one instruction they share

The wing of this spoke that does not measure things has turned out to be more coherent than its individual sources suggested. Three threads run through it: a lineage, a shared clinical stance, and a theory of creation that collides head-on with the experimental account.

sigmund-freud and erich-fromm complete a line the founding corpus started mid-way with carl-jung. Freud is the origin of the corpus’s central predicament — enormous explanatory reach on a clinical method that cannot test its own claims — and Jung and Fromm are two different departures from him: Jung deepening the unconscious into a shared layer, Fromm socializing it, using Marx to ask what an economic order does to the psyche it forms.

Fromm adds a genuinely new object: social character, the psyche as something a political order shapes. That is neither Jung’s individual depths nor Kahneman’s laboratory, and it stretches the spoke further than any other source so far.

Welcome the symptom — three schools, one instruction

in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary makes the third independent statement of what is now the corpus’s most repeated clinical instruction. james-hollis on midlife symptoms: they “should be welcomed, for they represent… a powerful imperative for renewal.” irvin-yalom on distress: a response to the givens of existence rather than a malfunction (existential-psychotherapy). francis-weller on grief and uncertainty: “welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded” (grief).

Three schools with different lineages, converging on one instruction, none of them reaching it by measuring anything. Record the convergence as what it is: not corroboration in the sense the rest of this wiki uses the word. It shows that the interpretive traditions share a stance toward suffering. Whether the stance helps anyone is a question none of these three sources is built to answer. acceptance-and-commitment-therapy is the interesting comparison: same instruction, roughly (accept rather than eliminate the aversive experience), and 900+ trials behind it. If a single finding connects the poetic corner of this spoke to its evidential one, it is that.

Weller’s addition is scale. Everything else here locates the structure inside a person — family conditioning, perceptual maps, one judging mind’s biases. Weller claims a collective initiation: “We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes.” The only prior move in that direction is erich-fromm‘s social character, where an economic order forms the psyche. Fromm named the mechanism; Weller does not, and a period is not a patient.

On evidence, this is the far edge. T3 rates Popova’s transmission, not what is transmitted: statements like “soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy” have no observation that would bear on them. the-middle-passage at least carried an untestable mechanism; this carries an image. It is also the first source here on a subject with a substantial clinical literature that it never mentions — grief lists what is missing, including a formal diagnosis the “grief is not pathology” framing would have to argue with.

Creativity has two accounts, and they disagree about what could settle it

flow gives the corpus a second explanation of making things, and it sits directly against the one already here. jung-on-creativity has the visionary work arriving from the collective unconscious with the artist as its instrument — knowable through interpretation. Flow has a describable state with proposed neural correlates (Default Mode Network, transient hypofrontality) that a person can be trained into.

Both are accounting for the same fact: good creative work doesn’t feel deliberately authored. They disagree about what that’s evidence of, and — the part that matters here — about what could ever settle it. So the founding method spectrum now appears within a single topic rather than only across different ones. That’s a better test of the spectrum than the founding corpus offered, since the subject is held constant and only the method varies.

Both accounts are thin. Each arrived through a second-hand source (an essayist on Jung, a book excerpt on flow), and the spoke still holds no primary literature on either.

The corpus’s own weak spot

Broken 2026-08-05, for the first time. kruger-dunning-1999 and magnus-peresetsky-2022 were fetched and read in full — the spoke’s first two T1s and its first primary research of any kind. Everything below stood for eight days and describes the corpus that existed until then; it is kept because the pattern it names is still true of every other subject here, and because what the two papers changed is best read against it. The section that follows this one is what they changed.

Still true after the 2026-07-28 batch, and in some ways sharper. Nothing here has been read in the original. The founding three were second-hand; of the six that followed, three are Wikipedia articles about books and people, one is a Google Books catalogue entry (the-trouble-with-testosterone, the spoke’s only T4 and its weakest page), and one is an author summarizing his own unread experiments. Encyclopedic sources are reliable about what a work says and how it was received and are not substitutes for the work.

Concretely: this wiki can now describe thinking-fast-and-slow‘s argument and its replication problems accurately, and has read neither the book nor a single one of the studies underneath it. The highest-value next sources remain primary — the 2006 Science income-happiness paper first, since the remembering/experiencing split does more work here than any other single result.

A second T4, and a new subject arriving at the weakest possible strength (2026-08-04). does-language-determine-thought opens language and cognition for the spoke — sapir-whorf-hypothesis, a subject with sixty years of experimental work behind it — and cites not one item of that work. It names Sapir and Whorf and no other researcher; its evidence is that languages carve up colour differently and differ in emotion vocabulary.

Worth separating what that costs from what it doesn’t. The source is accurate on the two things it actually does: distinguishing determinism from relativity, and reporting which of them the field rejected. Those are the shape of a claim and the state of a consensus, and a popular overview is competent to relay both. What it cannot support is any specific finding — so the spoke now has a concept page whose central claim rests on nobody’s data.

That makes it the cleanest instance yet of this section’s point, and the first where a whole subject entered at that strength rather than a single book. The pattern is no longer “the corpus reads about primary work instead of reading it” but “the corpus can acquire an entire topic without touching its evidence base at all.”

What reading two primaries actually bought

The spoke’s founding complaint was that it described primary work instead of reading it. One subject now runs the other way, and the difference is worth recording precisely, because “get the primary sources” has been an article of faith here rather than a demonstrated gain.

Three things the secondary source could not have given, in ascending order of importance.

Detail. kruger-dunning-1999 is four studies with four stated predictions, not one correlation. Study 3’s second phase — bottom- and top-quartile performers grading five peers’ papers — is where the top-performer half of the effect gets its explanation, the false-consensus effect, and the finding that gives the whole paper its shape: the incompetent are wrong about themselves, the competent are wrong about other people. No popular account of this effect carries that sentence.

A correction to this wiki. Working from the secondary, this spoke wrote that the 2022 analysis showed the pattern arising “in data with no effect in it.” magnus-peresetsky-2022 fits a censored model to 665 real exam predictions and argues the fit needs no psychological parameter. Close, and not the same claim. Corrected on the concept page with the change marked.

An argument neither source knows it is in. Kruger and Dunning anticipated the regression objection and built Study 4 against it: ten minutes of logic training moved the trained bottom quartile from an estimated 55th percentile to the 44th while an untrained control group did not move. A floor-and- ceiling artifact cannot produce that. Magnus and Peresetsky model the cross-sectional shape and never mention the experiment — and, in a smaller slip pointing the same way, state that top-performer underestimation was “not discussed in Kruger and Dunning (1999)” when it has a titled section there.

The rebuttal exists, in print, twenty-three years before the critique, and the critique does not engage it. No secondary source in this corpus reports that, and neither paper shows it alone — it becomes legible only when both sit on the same shelf, which is the wiki’s whole method doing the one thing it claims to do.

What it cost: two fetches and one afternoon. Against eight days of describing this material at one remove. The founding weak spot was correctly diagnosed and the fix is cheaper than the section above implies — which is itself a finding about the corpus, and an argument for closing edges 1 and 2 on the remaining subjects rather than treating primary access as aspirational.

The second weak spot is not about strength of evidence but about who chose the reading list.

One essayist supplies four of the sources

maria-popova and the-marginalian were paged on the third ingest that came through them (jung-on-creativity, the-middle-passage, jung-on-death), because at three it stops being a coincidence and becomes a property of the corpus. in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary made it four the next day.

Her essays are the better end of T3 — she quotes at length, names her anthologies and dates the material, which is why this wiki has Jung’s own sentences rather than a summary of them. The care needed is that the connective argument between the quotes is hers and is literary: in jung-on-death she reads Jung’s spaceless, timeless unconscious through Einstein and the curvature of spacetime, and none of the Jung she quotes mentions spacetime. Her outlet has no editor and no fact-checker by design, so nothing sits between the framing and the page.

The subtler cost is selection, and the fourth source makes it hard to keep calling subtle. Four Popova pieces means four subjects Popova finds interesting — Jung twice, a Jungian analyst, a grief therapist — and every one of them lands on the humanistic, depth-psychological end of this spoke. None comes near the experimental end where replication-crisis lives. The corpus’s shape is partly one reader’s taste, which is worth knowing before reading the balance of these pages as a balance of the field. The correction is not to stop ingesting her; it is that the next few sources should come from somewhere else.

Two have, since: does-language-determine-thought (2026-08-04) and dunning-kruger-misread (2026-08-05). The second is the one that counts for balance — a tech newsroom arguing about a specific published result, which is the experimental end the Popova run never approaches.

Writing, twice, from two different disciplines

The corpus now holds two sources on why writing is hard, and they share no machinery at all.

why-writing-feels-hard says the brain reads exposure as social threat, and reaches for Eisenberger, Baumeister and transient hypofrontality. dysgraphia-via-dyslexia says writing is the mapping of spoken language onto marks, and that difficulty is inefficiency somewhere in that mapping. One account is affective and universal; the other is linguistic and clinical.

They are not in conflict, and the reason is worth stating because it is easy to miss: they are about different populations. Dávila addresses everyone who finds a blank page frightening; Hoh addresses children whose written output falls persistently short of their ability. A spoke that collected only one of them would have a tidier and worse picture of the subject.

What dysgraphia adds structurally is the first developmental disorder here, and with it the first case where the corpus’s interest is in an intervention rather than an explanation.

The citation-chain pattern, third instance, with the weld in a new place. The named pattern above is a chain of real references terminating in a practice. This source has the chain — four cited works with volumes and pages, better sourcing than most popular writing here — and it terminates in a practice too: correct the foundational language processes rather than accommodate the child. But the untested weld is not the mechanism this time. Berninger’s remediation research is real and predates the author. The weld is comparative: nothing cited establishes that correction beats accommodation for a given child, which is exactly the claim the piece is written to make.

And there is a feature the earlier instances did not have. Hoh is CEO of a remediation company and the article carries no disclosure. Accommodation is something a school gives away; correction is something a company sells. That does not make her wrong — but it means the corpus has now seen the clinician-with-a-service structure twice (anna-lembke the sharper case), and once at a venue, psychology-today, whose whole model is recruiting practising clinicians to write for the public. The pattern belongs to the venue as much as to the author.

A load-bearing premise nobody here has read. The argument is a transfer — use dyslexia’s intervention evidence for dysgraphia — and this spoke holds nothing at all on dyslexia. That the dyslexia approach works is asserted by the interested party and unexamined here. A source on dyslexia remediation outcomes is now worth more to this corner than a second source on dysgraphia.

Open questions

• How much of the heuristics-and-biases corpus survived replication? Partly answered (2026-07-28, thinking-fast-and-slow): the damage is documented at chapter granularity — Ch. 4 (“The Associative Machine”) at a replicability index of 14, social priming worst hit — and Kahneman conceded it. What’s still unanswered is the other side: which findings did hold. The corpus can now say what to distrust and not what to rely on, which is the less useful half. Prospect theory and the core judgment-under-uncertainty work are generally held to have survived; no source here establishes that. Advanced 2026-08-05: dunning-kruger-misread reports a 2021 Nature replication (~4,000 participants per study, two studies) coming down on the metacognitive side — this wiki’s first named finding that held. Two caveats keep it from closing the question: the source names no author and no title for it, and the same source carries a statistical case that the dunning-kruger-effect would replicate whether or not it exists. So the corpus now has one survivor and a live argument about whether surviving proves anything. Advanced again 2026-08-12, and this time the verdict is fully documented. income-happiness-conflict-resolved (Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers, PNAS 2023) is an adversarial collaboration in which Kahneman took part in the reanalysis that revised his own satiation result: the plateau in experienced well-being holds only near the 15th percentile of happiness, up to about $100,000, and the original flat line came from 85% of high-income responses sitting at the scale maximum. Named authors, named method, a quantity that changed, and the disagreement published rather than settled by seniority. So the answer to this question now has three shapes in the corpus — a finding that broke (thinking-fast-and-slow Ch. 4), a finding that held (dunning-kruger-misread‘s 2021 replication), and a finding that was corrected to a narrower claim. The third is the most useful and the rarest.
• Does free-will scepticism change behaviour, and in which direction? free-will-belief-effects reports less hatred and more forgiveness; the older literature reported more cheating and aggression; the author’s answer is that the older work didn’t replicate. Both bodies of evidence are underpowered by current standards. Genuinely open, and consequential — determined argues for rebuilding criminal justice on the assumption.
• Is “world model” one thing or two? perceptual-learning uses the phrase for a perceptual similarity map; the AI spokes in this hub use it for a learned generative model of an environment. Currently an analogy on both sides.
• What is in ACT’s 900 trials? (added 2026-07-29) acceptance-and-commitment-therapy arrives with the largest evidence base in this wiki and the corpus cannot assess a single trial of it. The known failure modes of psychotherapy research are exactly the ones a raw count hides — researcher allegiance (the developer is frequently an author), small samples, and what the control condition was. Note the asymmetry in how this spoke has been treating numbers: it discounted thinking-fast-and-slow‘s citations on replication grounds and is currently crediting ACT’s on trial-count grounds, from a Wikipedia summary in both cases. The highest-value next source is a meta-analysis or a critical review of ACT — and if it turns out the count is doing more work than the trials, that is the same finding as the Ch. 4 replicability index, one discipline over.
• Does the “complete the stress cycle” mechanism have a literature? (added 2026-07-29) burnout-stress-cycle asserts that physical activity discharges an incomplete physiological stress response and that this prevents burnout. The claim is specific enough to be testable and no source here names a study. Its structural half (Human Giver Syndrome, from Kate Manne) is a moral-economy argument and would not be settled by one.
• What happened to developmental trauma disorder? (added 2026-07-29) van der Kolk proposed it for children with chronic early adversity, and no source here says whether any diagnostic manual took it. That matters more than the usual missing fact: a rejected proposal and an accepted one imply very different readings of the whole book, and the 122-claim audit doesn’t cover it either way.
• Does the borrowed vocabulary flow back? System 1/2 has travelled into AI system design (../defensive-security-wiki’s soc-fast-slow-thinking). Whether anything learned by building those systems constrains the psychology, or the traffic is one-way, is an open and testable question.
• What does the clinical literature on grief say? (added 2026-08-03) grief entered the wiki through a poetic account that engages none of the research on its own subject. Three specific holes: prolonged grief disorder as a formal diagnosis (which the “grief is not pathology” framing would have to argue with), whether the famous stage model survived scrutiny, and the process models that describe what mourners actually do. The second is the same question this spoke already asks of thinking-fast-and-slow and the-body-keeps-the-score, on a framework with even wider public circulation.
• Does “welcome the symptom” work? (added 2026-08-03) Three schools give the instruction (the-middle-passage, existential-psychotherapy, in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary) and none offers evidence for it. acceptance-and-commitment-therapy is the nearest testable relative, with 900+ trials behind a similar stance. Whether that literature actually bears on the depth-psychological version, or merely shares its vocabulary, is the connection this corpus most needs and does not have. Sharpened the same day (feeling-good): the instruction now has an explicit rival inside the wiki rather than only an absence of evidence — CBT says correct the thought, not welcome it.
• CBT or ACT? (added 2026-08-03) The two testable therapies here prescribe opposite operations on the same object and both cite large trial literatures. Head-to-head comparisons and dismantling studies are what would settle it, and the wiki holds none — the same shape as the unassessed 900 trials, now doubled. Highest-value next source in this corner: a comparative meta-analysis, or Beck’s own work rather than a book about a book about it (aaron-beck is paged from one encyclopedia article and deserves better).
• What is Jung’s status now? Enormously influential, empirically unsupported. Whether contemporary psychology has salvaged anything specific from analytical psychology, or routed around it entirely, is unsourced.

Growth edges

Ranked; each names the kind of source that would close it (see ../QUALITY.md → Growth edges).

1. First T1 — closed 2026-08-05 by kruger-dunning-1999 and magnus-peresetsky-2022, both read in full. The spoke went from zero peer-reviewed sources to two in one batch. What replaces it: primary sources are now the norm to hold this corpus to, not an aspiration. Every subject below is the same edge with a different topic attached.
2. Second-hand accounts dominate everywhere else — half closed 2026-08-12. The named next source was read: kahneman-income-happiness-2006 (T1, in full), and with it income-happiness-conflict-resolved (T1), which revises it. The Kahneman/Tversky corner now has two primaries under it and focusing-illusion no longer rests on an essay about the paper. Jung is untouched — carl-jung, analytical-psychology, second-half-of-life and jung-on-creativity are still entirely essayists and encyclopedias, which is now the whole of this edge. — needs: Jung in translation (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, the Collected Works volumes on archetypes) or a historian of psychology writing about him from the primary texts.
3. Clinical psychology is in the domain and thin. — needs: T1/T2 clinical source. The ACT-meta-analysis question under Open questions is the sharpest version.
4. The rest of the Dunning-Kruger literature — narrowed 2026-08-05 now that the two ends are held. Still missing and all identifiable: Krueger & Mueller (2002) and Kruger & Dunning’s published reply to it, Burson/Larrick/Klayman (2006), Gignac & Zajenkowski (2020), and the 2021 Nature replication that dunning-kruger-misread leaves unnamed. — needs: the 2002 exchange first, since this wiki now holds a critique that ignores Study 4 and cannot yet see whether the earlier round did too.
5. Experimental evidence for linguistic relativity — new 2026-08-04. The spoke acquired sapir-whorf-hypothesis from a source citing no study at all, so the whole subject sits on a consensus report with nothing under it. This is edge 1 in miniature and the easiest instance to close, because the literature is large and the specific claims are well known. — needs: primary experimental work on language and categorization (colour perception, spatial frames of reference, grammatical gender), T1 preferred; a review or meta-analysis would close it in one.

Coverage edges (added 2026-08-08, at the curator’s request for a wider backlog). These widen what the spoke covers instead of answering an open question above; one ordinary solid source closes any.

6. The Big Five. The best-validated model of personality is absent while analytical-psychology and carl-jung carry several pages between them, which leaves the spoke’s personality coverage resting on the interpretive tradition alone. — needs: a T1 review of the five-factor evidence.
7. Attachment and development. Bowlby and Ainsworth are assumed by the trauma pages (the-body-keeps-the-score, psychological-trauma) and stated by none. — needs: a review article or the original longitudinal work.
8. The classic social experiments, with their replication status attached. replication-crisis has no cases to apply to — Milgram, Asch, and the Stanford prison study are exactly the material it describes. — needs: the original papers plus the modern re-analyses.
9. Memory. The spoke covers thinking, bias and therapy, and not remembering — encoding, retrieval, or Loftus on false memory. — needs: a T1 review or the original eyewitness studies.

Contradictions / tensions

The founding note stood for a while: no factual conflicts, because the sources addressed different layers, and the live tension was methodological — a corpus whose members disagree not about findings but about what would count as one. That is still the deepest one.

The one dispute in this corpus that got settled

Two sources here disagree about whether experienced happiness stops rising with income, and unusually for this wiki, the disagreement has an ending. kahneman-income-happiness-2006 reports a correlation of 0.06 between household income and duration-weighted momentary happiness and reads it as independence; the satiation version of that claim put the ceiling near $75,000. Killingsworth’s experience sampling found no ceiling at all.

income-happiness-conflict-resolved holds both. The flattening is real near the 15th percentile of happiness and up to about $100,000; above that percentile happiness keeps rising with log(income) and accelerates in the happiest group; the original flat line was a ceiling in the instrument, with about 85% of high-income responses at the top of the scale. Below $100,000 the slope is steeper for the unhappy, above it flatter, both at P < 0.00001 — so the two results were measuring different parts of one distribution.

What makes it worth its own entry is not the finding but the procedure. Both parties reanalysed one dataset together with a third author as arbiter, and the senior party’s result was the one that narrowed. Set that against replication-crisis as this corpus usually invokes it — a story about incentives that reward neither correction nor being corrected. Kept as a tension rather than filed as resolved, because the reconciliation is correlational by the authors’ own statement, and Rohrer & Wenz’s objection that an “unhappy group” cannot be cleanly identified was conceded, not answered.

Two therapies, one fact, opposite consolations

jung-on-death gives the spoke its first substantive disagreement between two sources that are talking about the same thing.

irvin-yalom makes mortality one of four givens of existence and treats death anxiety as what therapy works on: look directly at it, with no promise about what follows (existential-psychotherapy, staring-at-the-sun). carl-jung treats death as the goal of a directed life-process, calls refusing the ending a refusal to live, and — after the heart attack he was not expected to survive — describes what follows it as “unspeakably glorious.”

Both are clinicians writing about the same fact for the same purpose, and they offer incompatible consolations. Neither source cites the other and no evidence here can adjudicate, which is the point worth recording: the disagreement is not empirical, so nothing in this corpus could settle it. It sits exactly on the founding methodological tension, one layer down — two traditions differing about what a therapy is for rather than about what is true.

A finding and its refutation, both held, neither winning

Added 2026-08-05, and it is the spoke’s first contradiction between two peer-reviewed sources — every earlier one was essayist against essayist or clinician against clinician.

kruger-dunning-1999: the bottom quartile scored at the 12th percentile and claimed the 62nd, because incompetence removes the means of noticing incompetence. magnus-peresetsky-2022: a three-parameter censored model with a random floor and ceiling, carrying no psychological term at all, fits 665 students’ self-predictions almost perfectly — “there is an effect, but it does not reflect human nature.”

What makes this different from the other tensions on this page is that it is decidable and has not been decided, and the reason it hasn’t is legible from the two papers side by side. Kruger and Dunning saw the objection coming: Study 4 trains the bottom quartile for ten minutes and their self-estimates drop sharply while an untrained control’s do not, which a boundary artifact cannot produce. Magnus and Peresetsky never address that experiment. The critique refutes the chart and leaves the experiment standing.

Recorded per the spoke’s edge rule as both claims kept and the conflict flagged, rather than as a debunking. The defensible position is narrow: the percentile-crossing figure everyone reproduces is explained by censoring, and the training result is not explained by anything except metacognition yet.

Two second-order notes worth keeping. The critique comes from econometricians, not psychologists (jan-magnus, anatoly-peresetsky) — the sharpest live challenge in this wiki was brought from outside the field, with tools the field does not routinely use, which is an argument for the discipline’s porousness and also for why the rebuttal went unread. And the 1999 evidence base is narrower than its fame: every participant across four studies is a cornell-university undergraduate taking a short test for credit, in quartile cells of eleven to thirty-seven.

Correct the thought, or accept it

The spoke now holds both halves of therapy’s central disagreement, and they contradict each other directly.

cognitive-behavioral-therapy, through feeling-good: the distressing thought is an error — a cognitive distortion — and the work is to catch it, test it against evidence, and replace it. acceptance-and-commitment-therapy: disputing the thought for accuracy is itself a way of staying entangled, so the work is to change the person’s relationship to it. Same object, opposite operation, and both traditions descend from aaron-beck‘s break with psychoanalysis.

What makes this the wiki’s most useful contradiction so far is that, unlike Jung against Yalom, it is not beyond evidence. Both sides are testable by construction and both arrive with large trial literatures — 900+ RCTs for ACT, an older and larger one for CBT. The disagreement is empirical and the corpus simply doesn’t hold the comparison.

It also runs the other way through everything else here. Three interpretive traditions tell the reader to welcome the symptom (the-middle-passage, existential-psychotherapy, in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary); ACT is the testable relative of that instruction; CBT is its flat opposite and the one with the mass-market reach. Yesterday’s reading — that the poetic corner and the evidential corner might be saying the same thing in different registers — survives only for the acceptance side of the split. It has a rival, and the rival is the one four million people bought.

A weaker second note. second-half-of-life holds two accounts that agree, Jung’s and james-hollis‘s, and the agreement establishes less than it appears to: Hollis is a Jungian analyst writing in a Jungian series, and both reach this wiki through the same essayist (maria-popova). A school agreeing with its founder, relayed by one reader, is one source wearing two hats.

Cross-spoke adjacency

• ../philosophy-wiki — philosophy of mind versus empirical psychology. Jung is the boundary case (he read Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; he practised psychiatry). Decide by method, not vocabulary: “the unconscious,” “perception,” “judgment” and “the self” are live terms in both.
• ../defensive-security-wiki — soc-fast-slow-thinking builds a security-operations design on System 1/2. The borrowed metaphor stays there; the psychology lives here.
• ../research-wiki — tools built to augment cognition, and the mechanizing-reasoning lineage. Human cognition as subject is here; the tool is there.
• ../speech-audio-wiki — audio AI models; the neuroscience of hearing is here.

Index — Psychology Wiki

Catalog of every page, grouped by schema.org @type. Spine: synthesis (thesis), log.md (history), this file (catalog). Spun out of the hub _inbox on 2026-07-28 (3 sources). Psychology has a replication problem and popular writing about it compounds one — record the study behind a claim, or say that a source gave none.

DefinedTerm (concepts / traditions)

• focusing-illusion — attending to something inflates its importance; the frame manufactures part of the answer, so a question shapes its own result · cognitive-bias
• heuristics-and-biases — the Kahneman/Tversky programme: shortcuts producing systematic error; System 1/2 and how far that vocabulary has travelled · research-programme
• analytical-psychology — Jung’s school: the collective unconscious, archetypes, the artist as instrument; clinical and interpretive method, and what that method can’t establish · tradition
• perceptual-learning — internal perceptual maps: largely stimulus-driven, stable across learning, similar in humans and mice; the corpus’s most tractable version of “structure you didn’t choose” · mechanism
• free-will — the question split three ways (metaphysics / what caused this behaviour / what belief in it does); the practical stake is blame, not agency; the disciplinary fight over who owns it is part of the record · problem
• flow — Csikszentmihalyi’s absorbed-engagement state (DMN, transient hypofrontality, the circulated 120-bits figure); creativity’s empirical tradition, set against Jung’s depth account of the same fact · concept
• existential-psychotherapy — Yalom’s school: distress as a response to four givens (isolation, meaninglessness, mortality, freedom), not a malfunction; the spoke’s cleanest method-not-vocabulary boundary case with ../philosophy-wiki · tradition
• second-half-of-life — Jung’s parabola reversing at life’s midday and Hollis’s midlife passage; the corpus’s clearest teacher-to-school lineage, and its weakest kind of agreement · concept
• replication-crisis — psychology’s finding that much of its literature doesn’t reproduce; here it is both a caveat and a move used inside arguments — cited against the opposing literature more readily than one’s own · methodological-problem
• sapir-whorf-hypothesis — linguistic relativity: does the language you speak shape how you think? Determinism (strong, rejected) vs relativity (weak, broadly accepted); opens language and cognition, and the corpus holds no experimental evidence for any of it · hypothesis
• dunning-kruger-effect — poor performers overrate their standing (12th percentile → 62nd); the paper has no time axis and no “Mount Stupid” curve. Written from both primaries: a censored-regression model explains the famous chart with no psychology in it, and explains none of Study 4’s training result — the critique refutes the figure and leaves the experiment standing · cognitive-bias
• illusion-of-explanatory-depth — believing you understand a mechanism in more detail than you do, revealed the moment you try to explain it; inducible — Fisher/Goddu/Keil (Yale 2015) show searching the internet inflates felt understanding without changing knowledge. The corpus’s cleanest contrast with dunning-kruger-effect: depth vs rank, given vs arrived-with · cognitive-bias
• note-taking-and-learning — does how you record a lecture change what you retain? The popular claim (paper beats keyboard), the measured one (Hedges’ g = 0.248 for handwriting on tests, 0.919 for typing on volume, two nulls), and the mechanism that reconciles them — the constraint is the active ingredient, not the medium; every figure arrives through a T3 secondary · mechanism
• grief — the response to loss, held here only in its depth-psychological form (apprenticeship, descent, “nothing excluded”); the page exists mainly to name the clinical literature this corpus lacks — prolonged grief disorder, the unsupported stage model, the process models · clinical-subject

MedicalCondition

• dysgraphia — a persistent gap between the writing produced and the writing predicted; a language disorder the name points away from — messy handwriting can be the downstream cost of not retaining the word. Overlaps dyslexia in over a third of cases; production is harder than comprehension. The corrective-vs-accommodation question is its live one, and this corpus holds no outcome comparison · clinical-subject
• dyslexia — deliberately thin: no source here is about it. It arrived as the comparison case in dysgraphia-via-dyslexia, whose whole argument transfers dyslexia’s intervention evidence — making it the spoke’s clearest load-bearing unread premise · clinical-subject
• psychological-trauma — trauma as an injury to body and nervous system rather than memory alone; attachment as protection, developmental trauma disorder, somatic treatment over talking — and the 122-claim audit that found the core of it unsupported · clinical-subject

MedicalTherapy

• cognitive-behavioral-therapy — thoughts cause feelings, so correct the thought: cognitive distortions caught, tested and replaced; built by aaron-beck out of the objection that psychoanalysis couldn’t be tested, and the flat opposite of the corpus’s repeated “welcome the symptom” instruction · therapy
• acceptance-and-commitment-therapy — ACT: mindfulness/acceptance/values, built on Hayes’s Relational Frame Theory; 900+ RCTs, WHO/APA/VA recognition — the largest evidence base in this wiki, and the counterexample to “clinical = untestable” · therapy

ScholarlyArticle (sources)

• kruger-dunning-1999 — the paper itself, read in full: JPSP 77(6), four studies (humour/logic/grammar), the 12th→62nd percentile figure, the four stated predictions, The Burden of Expertise and the false-consensus account of top-performer error, and Study 4’s training manipulation — built to answer the regression objection · source · T1 · Cornell undergraduates throughout
• kahneman-income-happiness-2006 — Kahneman/Krueger/Schkade/Schwarz/Stone, Science 312:1908, read in full: household income correlates 0.32 with life satisfaction and 0.06 with duration-weighted happiness; the predicted bad-mood gap between income bands is 32 pp against an actual 12.2; the time-use mechanism (passive leisure 34.7% → 19.9%, work+commute up) · source · T1 · a Perspective, part review and part first presentation of the authors’ data
• income-happiness-conflict-resolved — Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers, PNAS 120(10) 2023: the adversarial collaboration that revised Kahneman’s own satiation result — flattening only near the 15th happiness percentile and only to ~$100,000, the original plateau traced to 85% of high-income answers at the scale maximum; with the authors’ 2024 reply to critics · source · T1 · article paywalled (403), held from the abstract plus the open-access reply
• magnus-peresetsky-2022 — Magnus & Peresetsky, Frontiers in Psychology 13:840180: a doubly-censored tobit model with no psychological parameter fits 665 students’ self-predicted exam grades almost perfectly — “there is an effect, but it does not reflect human nature.” Never engages Study 4, and misstates that K&D didn’t discuss top-performer underestimation · source · T1 · econometricians, not psychologists

Book (sources)

• thinking-fast-and-slow — Kahneman 2011 (via Wikipedia): System 1/2, prospect theory, WYSIATI, the experiencing vs remembering self and the peak-end rule; and its own Ch. 4 citations at a replicability index of 14, which Kahneman conceded · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org
• determined — Sapolsky 2023 (via Wikipedia): no free will, therefore rebuild blame and punishment; reception splits on whether a neurobiologist can answer a philosophical question (Riskin: “scientism”) · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org
• staring-at-the-sun — Yalom 2008 (via Wikipedia): death anxiety as a pervasive influence dissolved by looking at it directly; the mortality given of existential-psychotherapy taken alone · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org
• the-middle-passage — Hollis 1993 (via The Marginalian): first adulthood runs on a provisional personality assembled from family conditioning; midlife distress is the authentic self pressing against it, and should be “welcomed” — the corpus’s most direct statement of its own thesis, and the only one claiming the structure can be dismantled · source · T3 · themarginalian.org
• a-liberated-mind — Hayes 2019 (via Wikipedia on Hayes): the trade statement of acceptance-and-commitment-therapy; the entry confirms the book exists and not what it argues — recorded for the 900-trial programme behind it · source · T3 · en.wikipedia.org
• burnout-stress-cycle — Nagoski & Nagoski 2019 (via listings/reviews): the stressor is not the stress — removing the cause doesn’t close the physiological loop; plus Human Giver Syndrome (Kate Manne) as a structural account of women’s burnout; confident physiology, thin citation · source · T3 · burnoutbook.net
• dopamine-nation — Lembke 2021 (via Wikipedia + critical reviews): pleasure and pain on one seesaw, tipped by digital overstimulation; abstinence to recalibrate. The mechanism holds and the book outran it — the seesaw oversimplifies, “dopamine fasting” misnames the object, recovery runs weeks not days, and Lembke conceded the central simplification in the NYT · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org
• the-body-keeps-the-score — van der Kolk 2014 (via Wikipedia): trauma lives in the body, so treat the body (EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback) — ~300 weeks on the NYT bestseller list against a 2025 BJPsych Bulletin audit of 122 claims finding the brain-damage and body-treatment core unsupported; the corpus’s first case where reach and evidence are both counted, and the first with no author concession · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org
• feeling-good — Burns 1980 (routed as an Amazon listing, content via Wikipedia): the mass-market statement of cognitive-behavioral-therapy, 4M US copies — and the only book here that was itself trialled as the treatment (meta-analysis of six bibliotherapy studies, Scogin et al. 1989), which inverts the spoke’s bestseller-then-audit pattern; the jacket still outruns the trials · source · T2 · en.wikipedia.org + amazon.com
• in-the-absence-of-the-ordinary — Weller (via The Marginalian, 2026-08-02): uncertainty as initiation, grief as apprenticeship, “welcoming all of who we are… Nothing excluded” — the third statement of the corpus’s “welcome the symptom” instruction and the first to claim a collective initiation; the least testable source here (T3 rates Popova’s transmission, not the content) · source · T3 · themarginalian.org
• the-trouble-with-testosterone — Sapolsky 1997 essays (via a Google Books listing): the early statement of the biology-of-behaviour position; the spoke’s weakest source — establishes what the book covers, nothing about what it argues · source · T4 · books.google.com

Article (sources)

• free-will-belief-effects — The Conversation (Aaron Walton, Melbourne, 2026-07-26): two experiments (260/262) find free-will scepticism raises forgiveness and lowers hatred; a 44-country survey (n=8,917) ties stronger free-will belief to harsher punishment; discounts the contrary literature as non-replicating · source · T3 · theconversation.com
• kahneman-focusing-illusion — Space Daily (Mal James, 2026-07-23): Kahneman’s “fortune-cookie maxim,” the California/weather study with Schkade, and the 2006 Science income-happiness split; the trigger source · source · T3 · spacedaily.com
• jung-on-creativity — The Marginalian (Maria Popova, 2026-07-22) on Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul: psychological vs visionary creation, the artist as instrument, the collective unconscious as Jung’s break with Freud · source · T3 · themarginalian.org
• jung-on-death — The Marginalian (Maria Popova, 2026-07-31) on Jung’s “death is not an end but a goal”: life as an irreversible energy-process, an unconscious in “relative spacelessness and timelessness,” the parabola reversing at midlife, and the 1944 near-death letters. Quotes are solid; the Einstein/spacetime framing is the essayist’s, not Jung’s · source · T3 · themarginalian.org
• why-writing-feels-hard — Lit Hub (April Dávila, from Sit Write Here, 2026): writing feels dangerous because the brain reads exposure as social threat; cites Eisenberger/Baumeister/Chen/Raichle/Csikszentmihalyi/Dietrich by name, then welds them into a case for ten minutes of pre-writing meditation — the corpus’s clearest citation chain terminating in a practice · source · T3 · lithub.com
• does-language-determine-thought — TheCollector (Giulia Villa, 2026-08-04): a clean separation of linguistic determinism from linguistic relativity and an accurate report of the consensus — citing no study and no researcher past Sapir and Whorf, with colour terms and emotion vocabulary as its whole evidence; omits both Hopi time and Inuit snow · source · T4 · thecollector.com
• dunning-kruger-misread — Silicon Canals (Justin Brown, 2026-08-05): what the 1999 study measured (12th → 62nd percentile, single sitting) against what the internet made of it; four studies for and against, incl. the first named successful replication in this wiki (2021 Nature, ~4,000/study) and a 2022 Frontiers artifact case — three of its six citations name no author · source · T3 · siliconcanals.com
• epictetus-learning-spacedaily — Space Daily (mal-james, 2026-08-08) on Discourses 2.17.1: adds Fisher/Goddu/Keil (Yale 2015, nine experiments) on search-inflated understanding, two unheld david-dunning quotes, and a self-test (“explain it without looking anything up”). Reports the Dunning-Kruger reassessment rather than the myth, citing Eric Gaze in Scientific American — the genre most likely to get it wrong, getting it right · source · T3 · spacedaily.com
• dysgraphia-via-dyslexia — coral-ps-hoh, psychology-today (2026-08-09): dysgraphia as a language disorder, not penmanship; heavy overlap with dyslexia; correct the foundational processes rather than accommodate. Four real references with volumes and pages — the best-cited popular source in this wiki — and no disclosure that the author’s company sells remediation. The 20% prevalence figure is cited but unverified, and is the same number quoted for dyslexia · source · T3 · psychologytoday.com
• handwriting-vs-typing-notes — silicon-canals (2026-08-12): the handwriting-beats-typing claim cut down to size — a 2024 Educational Psychology Review meta-analysis (24 studies, g = 0.248), a 2021 direct replication of Mueller & Oppenheimer that found no difference (74 laptop / 68 longhand), and a 2026 Frontiers in Education EEG study (n=33) that found none either. The corpus’s first replication failure that shrank a finding instead of deleting it — and the outlet’s second study reported with no authors · source · T3 · siliconcanals.com
• human-mouse-perceptual-maps — MedicalXpress on Seiler & Rumpel (Mainz, Communications Psychology 2026): humans and mice build similar internal maps of pulsed-sound sequences, stable through learning; the corpus’s only experiment · source · T2 · medicalxpress.com

Person

• sigmund-freud — founder of psychoanalysis; origin of the corpus’s central predicament — enormous explanatory reach on a method that can’t test its own claims
• robert-sapolsky — neuroendocrinologist and primatologist; two books here, twenty-six years apart, hardening one claim (behaviour has biological causes) into a thesis about free will and punishment
• erich-fromm — Frankfurt School psychoanalyst; social character — the psyche as something a political and economic order shapes; the spoke’s hardest philosophy boundary case
• daniel-kahneman — founder (with Tversky) of heuristics-and-biases; 2002 Nobel in economics for psychology; publicly walked back his confidence in social priming
• irvin-yalom — Stanford psychiatrist emeritus, built the best-known model of existential psychotherapy; wrote a novel about Nietzsche and files here anyway, on method
• mal-james — writer of Space Daily’s “Mind & Meaning” essays; two sources here, and one method: a compressed saying, two named findings, and a test the reader can run rather than an exhortation. Two for two on accuracy; every study still arrives at second hand
• james-hollis — Zurich-trained Jungian analyst; Jung’s individuation applied to one life stage, the midlife passage from provisional self to second adulthood
• steven-hayes — clinical psychologist (Nevada, Reno); built both a theory of cognition (RFT) and the therapy applying it (ACT), then trialled it — the spoke’s counterexample on clinical testability
• anna-lembke — Stanford addiction psychiatrist, 100+ papers; the spoke’s clearest case of one person at both ends of its evidence problem — the peer-reviewed record and the bestseller her field disputes
• carl-jung — founder of analytical psychology; enormous influence, thin empirical support; the spoke’s clearest boundary case with ../philosophy-wiki
• maria-popova — sole author of the-marginalian; the route by which four of this spoke’s sources arrived, and therefore a selection filter on it as well as a quoter of record — all four land on the depth-psychological end
• bessel-van-der-kolk — psychiatrist, founded the Trauma Center (1982), DSM PTSD committees; the register problem without the concession — recovered-memory testimony in the 1990s, a 2003 critique never answered, and a bestseller in between
• aaron-beck — father of cognitive therapy; built it out of the finding that psychoanalysis had no empirical support for depression, and both of this spoke’s testable therapies descend from that break; paged thin from one article about someone else’s book
• david-d-burns — Beck-trained psychiatrist who put CBT into four million households; the register problem in its cleanest form — a rigour critic of antidepressant research whose own jacket promises a cure, over a real but modest evidence base
• david-dunning — social psychologist, co-author of kruger-dunning-1999; paged on the ingest that made him an author rather than a subject, which is the ENTITIES rule working
• justin-kruger — first author of kruger-dunning-1999; on the record here for the four-prediction structure and the Study 4 training manipulation, the part of the paper most often left out
• jan-magnus — econometrician (VU Amsterdam), first author of magnus-peresetsky-2022; the wiki’s sharpest live challenge to a psychological finding, brought from outside psychology
• matthew-killingsworth — happiness researcher whose experience-sampling app supplied the data; contradicted Kahneman on income satiation and was brought into the reanalysis that settled it, which is the corpus’s one counter-instance to its own story about incentives
• anatoly-peresetsky — econometrician (HSE Moscow), co-author of magnus-peresetsky-2022; the 665-student exam dataset behind it is his institution’s
• justin-brown — Co-Publisher of silicon-canals and byline on dunning-kruger-misread; paged thin on purpose — no author page, no stated credential, no biography on the piece
• coral-ps-hoh — clinical linguist (PhD linguistics), CEO of EduNational LLC; a linguist writing clinically where this corpus’s clinicians are psychiatrists — and the milder second instance of the clinician-with-a-service structure after anna-lembke · author
• francis-weller — psychotherapist working on grief in its ritual and communal forms; the third clinician here to call distress an invitation rather than a malfunction, and the first to say it of a period rather than a person; makes no claim an audit could check

Organization

• the-marginalian — NewsMediaOrganization: Popova’s reader-funded, ad-free, one-person essay site since 2006; no editor and no fact-checker by design, which is why its pieces cap at T3 here · publisher

• cornell-university — CollegeOrUniversity: the entire empirical base of kruger-dunning-1999 — both authors, and every participant across four studies, in cells of 11–37 · research site

• space-daily — NewsMediaOrganization: space-and-astronomy publisher (est. 1995) running a daily “Mind & Meaning” psychology column; two sources here, both T3 for the genre’s habit of reporting studies without titles or venues · publisher

• silicon-canals — NewsMediaOrganization: Amsterdam tech publication (2014, Brown Brothers Media since Nov 2025) whose three editorial pillars include Mind; discloses AI-assisted drafting with human editorial judgment, and caps at T3 anyway — the review is of the writing, not of the science · publisher

• psychology-today — NewsMediaOrganization: the US’s best-known popular psychology title, whose blog platform recruits practising clinicians to write under their own credentials with an editorial reviewer line; the clinician-with-a-service pattern is built into the venue, not just its authors. Caps at T3 like the rest of the genre · publisher

Synthesis

• synthesis — the thesis: the mind runs on structure its owner didn’t choose and can’t inspect, plus the founding method spectrum (psychophysics → survey → clinical interpretation)

Notes

• Amazon-listing precedent (2026-08-03): feeling-good was routed as a bookseller page, which is T4 and yields edition facts and jacket copy only (cf. the-trouble-with-testosterone). The argument and the bibliotherapy studies were taken from Wikipedia and the page is tiered on that, with both URLs recorded. A listing alone is not enough to write from; a listing plus an encyclopedia is the same standard as the rest of the Book shelf here.
• Entity nodes deferred — Amos Tversky, David Schkade, Maria Popova, Mal James, Aaron Walton, Jason Zweig, the determined reviewers (Fischer, Riskin, Setiya, Crumey) and the Seiler/Rumpel authors are named on their pages but not paged. Tversky remains the likeliest first — he is half of heuristics-and-biases and recurs across thinking-fast-and-slow. Dunning and Kruger were deferred earlier the same day and paged hours later — the rule behaving exactly as written, recorded because it is a clean worked example. Against dunning-kruger-misread they were the subject of a source, which ../ENTITIES.md excludes from discovery. Against kruger-dunning-1999 they are its authors, and the paper supplied the affiliation and the substance the popular piece hadn’t. Deferral was the right call on the evidence then available, not a backlog item.
• Standing weakness — broken once, on 2026-08-05. For its first eight days nothing in this wiki had been read in the original. kruger-dunning-1999 and magnus-peresetsky-2022 are the exception and the spoke’s first two T1s. The weakness holds for every other subject: three sources are Wikipedia articles about books and people, one is a bookseller’s catalogue entry, and encyclopedic sources are reliable about what a work says and how it was received without being the work. Next highest value is still the 2006 Science income-happiness paper.
• What the primaries bought (2026-08-05): reading both ends of one dispute surfaced a fact no secondary source in the corpus reports — the 2022 critique never engages the 1999 paper’s Study 4, the experiment built to answer exactly that objection. Argument in synthesis.md. The cost was two fetches, which is the case for closing the remaining primary-source edges rather than filing them as aspirations.
• Bridge node: soc-fast-slow-thinking (defensive-security-wiki) borrows System 1/2 for SOC design. The metaphor lives there; the psychology lives here.