> One of the criticisms of psychological studies historically has been that we've been studying mostly abnormal behaviors
I’m not sure this is actually true. There’s tons of data from “normal” subjects, though normal here mostly means “average behavior of an 18-22 year old college student.” If anything, psychology would probably benefit from more focus on individual differences rather than commonalities.
For some more context I was paraphrasing a passage from a psychology textbook about the position psychology was in several decades ago, in particular about how languages are processed in the brain and how most of what we've learned about processing languages came from analyzing people's brains that acquired disabilities such as through strokes, accidents, etc. I do agree with you to question the the original validity of the statement in relevance to where we are now - my point is to question the status quo in business discussions of primarily studying the survivors when they're the minority for tech businesses and to ask some more fundamental questions of "are all these business principles relevant after the survivors talk about it publicly?" or is it closer to revealing winning lottery numbers after the drawing is over?
I must admit I may be missing some much more fundamentals that are discussed in academic programs for business (like data structures in CS programs) but am curious why they're treated as table stakes for merely talking about topics like market fit and growth projections when engineers do talk frequently about "basics" like essential data structures.
I’m not sure this is actually true. There’s tons of data from “normal” subjects, though normal here mostly means “average behavior of an 18-22 year old college student.” If anything, psychology would probably benefit from more focus on individual differences rather than commonalities.