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Related: About this forumMany Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says
Source: New York Times
Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says
By BENEDICT CAREY AUG. 27, 2015
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 its unprecedented, said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html
bananas
(27,509 posts)Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)Amazing how registration changed things.
AuntPatsy
(9,904 posts)jtuck004
(15,882 posts)to do science correctly too?
Damn, that's just asking a hell of a lot.They thought they had already accomplished something by breathing.
Igel
(35,317 posts)One, you need results. Data dredge to your heart's content using nifty stats without understanding the mathematical assumptions behind them.
Two, you need the right results. Motivated reasoning applies here. You know what you want to show, and so you do the experiment or dredge until you get the results you want. In many cases, the results have social implications so that the researcher can be a social savior, and who doesn't want to save people?
People act like big pharma and psych and education researchers are unrelated species. Both want to reach goals for their own personal reasons.
qazplm
(3,626 posts)I've worked with folks in the social sciences a ton...particularly psychology.
I don't think they are trying to do anything other than give what they think is the right answer, most of the time (although there is certainly a nice collection of folks on both side who will say whatever their client wants them to say).
But the more I work with them, the more convinced I am just how soft their science is.