own subject matter? One candidate would be Avail- ability-Misweighing Tendency

grounded in a preference for easy-to-control data. And then the restrictions

would eventually create an extreme case of man with a hammer tendency. Another

candidate might be envy/jealousy Tendency through which early psychology

professors displayed some weird form of envy of a physics that was

misunderstood. And this possibility tends to demonstrate that leaving

envy/jealousy out of academic psychology was never a good idea.

 

I now quitclaim all these historical mysteries to my betters.

 

Well, that ends my brief description of psychological tendencies.

 

Questions and Answers:

Now, as promised, I will ask and answer a few general questions.

 

My first is a compound question: Isn’t this list of psychological tendencies

tautological to some extent compared to the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t

there overlaps in the tendencies? And couldn’t the system be laid out just as

plausibly in a somewhat different way?

 

The answers are yes, yes, and yes, but this matters only moderately. Further

refinement of these tendencies, while desirable, has a limited practical

potential because a significant amount of messiness is unfixable in a soft

science like psychology.