Science!

Don't believe what you read, especially if it's the result of a social science study:

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

“I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,” said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. Among them was one on free will. It found that participants who read a passage arguing that their behavior is predetermined were more likely than those who had not read the passage to cheat on a subsequent test.

Another was on the effect of physical distance on emotional closeness. Volunteers asked to plot two points that were far apart on graph paper later reported weaker emotional attachment to family members, compared with subjects who had graphed points close together.

A third was on mate preference. Attached women were more likely to rate the attractiveness of single men highly when the women were highly fertile, compared with when they were less so. In the reproduced studies, researchers found weaker effects for all three experiments.

The project began in 2011, when a University of Virginia psychologist decided to find out whether suspect science was a widespread problem. He and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified the 100 studies published in 2008, and rigorously redid the experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/s...med-study-says.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

 

Yes, always trust corporate shills, lobbyists and PR mouthpieces instead, because we know they would never lie.

 

Publication bias in the social sciences is a very big issue. Lotsa lotsa lotsa papers (none of mine, of course) are just Type I errors.

 

Poor attempt at deflection ... again.

 

I can't imagine where he might have picked up that habit on this site.

Seriously, what is the point here? Some researchers fucked up or cheated so feel free to ignore science whenever you feel like it? Yeah, there's some backwards thinking that we need to move forward as a society.

 

Please. Starman is smarter than you. Has been since he was a toddler.

 

School Marm doesn't like this thread.

 

She blinded me with?

 

Oh Kelly LeBrock.... 80's version.

 

I still say that Pluto is a planet, science be damned!