Math envy. It affects more than economics and often only obscures the intended meaning (if there’s any there in the first place) while giving the illusion of rigor because symbols...and “math”!
Indeed. One of the more infamous examples comes from the field of positive psychology [1]. A psychology researcher used fluid dynamics formulas to come up with ratios of positive to negative experiences that separate languishing from flourishing. And then one of those articles [2] got numerous citations in the literature, helping to establish the idea of this ratio and a whole little clade of research that took the validity of that ratio for granted. To be fair, one of the reasons for its infamy is that the Alan Sokal co-authored an article [3] that ruthlessly criticized the mathematical methods.
[1] This is a surprisingly hard term to really pin down. Loosely speaking, the idea is that we should be able to characterize the development of psychological strengths independently of any taxonomy of diseases or disorders. However, explanations of it often seamlessly bleed over into concepts more characteristic of virtue ethics, Stoicism, rugged individualism, and self-help. The more cynical part of me wants to dismiss it as the clinical psychology equivalent of vitalism, but perhaps that is just a pattern that characterizes its excesses.
