To busy readers: Skip to the tl;dr summary at the end of this post. A psychology researcher sent me an email with subject line, “There’s a hell of a paper coming out in PPNAS today.” He sent me a copy … Continue reading
Someone pointed me to this post from Jonatan Pallesen: Frequently, when I [Pallesen] look into a discussed scientific paper, I find out that it is astonishingly bad. • I looked into Claudine Gay’s 2001 paper to check a specific thing, … Continue reading
This is Jessica. Null results are hard to take. This may seem especially true when you preregistered your analysis, since technically you’re on the hook to own up to your bad expectations or study design! How embarrassing. No wonder some … Continue reading
In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the political journalist George Orwell drew a connection between cloudy writing and cloudy content. The basic idea was: if you don’t know what you’re saying, or if you’re trying to say … Continue reading
Monday, February 12, 2024, 12:00pm to 1:15pm Social penumbras predict political attitudes The political influence of a group is typically explained in terms of its size, geographic concentration, or the wealth and power of the group’s members. This article introduces … Continue reading
I’ve often appealed to “common sense” or “face validity” when considering unusual research claims. For example, the statement that single women during certain times of the month were 20 percentage points more likely to support Barack Obama, or the claim … Continue reading
Kelsey Piper writes: I’m writing about the replication crisis for Vox and I was wondering if you saw this blog post from one of the DARPA replication project participants, particularly the section that argues: I frequently encounter the notion that … Continue reading
The post below addresses a bunch of specifics about Harvard, but for the key point, jump to the last paragraph of the post. Problems about Harvard A colleague pointed me to this post by Christopher Brunet, “The Curious Case of … Continue reading
I was having a discussion with someone about problems with the science reform movement (as discussed here by Jessica), and he shared his opinion that “Scientific reform in some corners has elements of millenarian cults. In their view, science is … Continue reading
In an paper entitled, “Causal claims about scientific rigor require rigorous causal evidence,” Joseph Bak-Coleman and Berna Devezer write: Protzko et al. (2023) claim that “High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioral findings is achievable.” They argue that the 86% rate … Continue reading
Gustavo Novoa, Margaret Echelbarger, et al. write: American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to … Continue reading
How much do people consume news media that is mainly consumed by their co-partisans? And how do new media, including social media and their “dangerous algorithms“, contribute to this? One way of measuring the degree of this partisan co-consumption of … Continue reading
As you may have heard, Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson learned a lot by reanalyzing data from an article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end”; see … Continue reading
Someone pointed me to this Vision Statement by Chris Chambers, a psychology professor who would like to edit Psychological Science, a journal that just a few years ago was notorious for publishing really bad junk science. Not as bad as … Continue reading
People sometimes confuse certainty about summary statistics with certainty about draws from the distributions they summarize. Saying that we are quite confident that the average outcome for one group is higher than the average for the other can be taken … Continue reading
There is a good deal of coverage of the more shocking reasons that papers on the psychology of dishonesty by Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino need to be corrected or retracted. I thought I’d share a more mundane example — … Continue reading
Jonathan Falk writes: This is an interesting story of heterogeneity of response, and an interesting story of “adversarial collaboration,” and an interesting PNAS piece. I need to read it again later this weekend, though, to see if the stats make … Continue reading
Back in 2020, leading academics and researchers at the company now known as Meta put together a large project to study social media and the 2020 US elections — particularly the roles of Instagram and Facebook. As Sinan Aral and … Continue reading
Someone who I don’t know writes: If you decide to share this publicly, say in your blog, let me stay anonymous. It’s funny how people want anonymity on these things! Anyway, my correspondent continues: I came across this 2016 PNAS … Continue reading
So, a few people emailed me about this story about fraud among high-profile business school professors. There was this news article by Stephanie Lee, who’s reported on some notable examples of bad research in the past. From her recent article, … Continue reading