The piece kind of focuses on psychology, but this amnesia and collective forgetting tends to happen in all fields to some extent. It might be more significant in psychology, but there is research showing that some of the most cited papers tend to cite both new and very very old work (that is the references cited tend to vary in chronological age significantly), that significant research is often forgotten and sometimes rediscovered.
I think it goes along with the Kuhnian (?) idea of paradigms becoming overly dominant and overly entrenched, and coming and going wholesale in waves. It's also consistent with Stigler's law of eponymy. As fields lurch from one idea or paradigm to another they tend to pretend that anything similar didn't exist beforehand. There's a need to represent ones's self and ideas as revolutionary and genius and implicitly, by comparison, to denigrate everything that came before as irrelevant.
This article describes a related but different phenomenon:
One of my curiosities is whether or not this has gotten worse in science and academics.
It often feels like in academics there's such a pressure for self-promotion and receipt of attention, to capture attention and be at the center of what is the focus of attention, that issues of veridicality or what has and should be the focus of attention gets swept away.
...this amnesia and collective forgetting tends to happen in all fields to some extent...
Well, I think there can an opposite problem that appears looking at these things. Psychology is such garbage, so likely to produce worthless experiments, that those that don't want to call a spade a spade instead try to take all the garbage of the field and average it over all science so that they can have something different to say.
This relates to the "replication crisis" [1]. You can say "The replication crisis is frequently discussed in relation to psychology and medicine..." but also said to extend throughout science. It may indeed extend throughout sciences but including a data group (experimental psychology) that you is garbage isn't necessarily a good way to see what's happening in the rest of science.
And, of course, a field "having amnesia" by itself doesn't necessarily imply any kind of problem. A given practitioner A) can only remember so much and B) benefits from a compact statement of a result, which may be quite different from how the result was originally stated. The math I learned in my MA came from text books that gave self-contained summaries of the various topics, rather than from the original papers the ideas came from and that made it much easier.
I think it goes along with the Kuhnian (?) idea of paradigms becoming overly dominant and overly entrenched, and coming and going wholesale in waves. It's also consistent with Stigler's law of eponymy. As fields lurch from one idea or paradigm to another they tend to pretend that anything similar didn't exist beforehand. There's a need to represent ones's self and ideas as revolutionary and genius and implicitly, by comparison, to denigrate everything that came before as irrelevant.
This article describes a related but different phenomenon:
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news-blog/review-article...
One of my curiosities is whether or not this has gotten worse in science and academics.
It often feels like in academics there's such a pressure for self-promotion and receipt of attention, to capture attention and be at the center of what is the focus of attention, that issues of veridicality or what has and should be the focus of attention gets swept away.