Debunking and Discovery in Social Psychology
Most reported social-psych findings fail replication. Debunking false claims is not second-class science; it clears a path when originals bury nulls.
Read Article →Archive
Full catalog of 62 articles and essays
Is social psychology self-correcting?
Social psychology has not self-corrected political bias. No hiring or journal fixes exist; “science is self-correcting” assumes machinery never built.
Read Article →Are minorities throttling their efforts?
Do diversity primes lead minorities to ease off before tests and promotions? Chronic strategic effort cuts could widen skill gaps; it needs experiments.
Read Article →Evolutionary psychology must be constrained by evolutionary biology
Grasslands survival-memory effects are not Pleistocene adaptations. Invariant scenery is not a selection problem; evo psych must answer to evo biology.
Read Article →New article in Pacific Standard
Angela Chen’s Pacific Standard piece on the BBS paper hits a neglected point: Big Five openness items track urban taste more than a culture-free trait.
Read Article →The Leon Project
The Leon Project would warehouse social-science data and tagged hypotheses for live meta-analysis. Pooled samples could test effects in minority groups.
Read Article →Muslim Presidents
Carson’s Muslim-president veto treats a stereotype as a person. For high office, individual evidence should retire group priors, as Kennedy argued in 1960.
Read Article →Heterodox Academy
Heterodox Academy launches against one-ideology academia. Social science needs non-leftists and apolitical scientists so review can catch embedded values.
Read Article →Needless suffering / call a Mexican
Untrained faculty mentors inflict needless graduate-student suffering. Global “you suck” judgments are not pedagogy. The author offers to listen.
Read Article →What I’ve learned researching the emotion of envy
Recalled envy episodes beat canned lab inductions. Sister-to-sister rivalry is a raw elicitor. Measure the emotion by function, not just the everyday word.
Read Article →Hurricanes as imagined, construed, and filtered
Klotzbach and Landsea find no significant rise in Cat 4-5 storms after better data. Media will hype scare papers and bury this--filtered climate reality.
Read Article →Minors, Lewandowsky, and Ceremonial Ethics
PLOS ONE forced a correction, but Lewandowsky kept 14-17-year-olds without prior IRB consent. UWA’s retroactive ethics blessing is ceremonial, not ethical.
Read Article →Nimble skepticism (Updated)
If new evidence kills the warming slowdown, skeptics should drop the identity. Climate is not a team; surface records are estimates, not meter readings.
Read Article →Correction / counting
One listed Cook paper was mitigation, not endorsement; a welding paper was explicit endorsement. Fraudulent studies have no percentage left to recompute.
Read Article →All sides
Exposing Cook’s fraud is not climate skepticism. AGW is not history’s biggest hoax. Fraud means willful lies about methods, not merely lower ECS estimates.
Read Article →The climate science consensus is 78 – 84 percent (Updated)
Qualified surveys of climate scientists put attribution consensus at 78-84%, not 97%. Cook-style abstract ratings are not surveys and should not set it.
Read Article →Gays, Islam, and the Virtues of Cognition (Updated)
Polls, not sermons, settle whether Muslim societies accept homosexuality. Most do not; executions are real. Ideology that denies the data abandons reality.
Read Article →Sam Harris, Jon Haidt, and Bias
Haidt’s certainty-word counts and Harris’s moral science both miss how bias works. Shared blind spots survive peer review when almost everyone shares them.
Read Article →ISPP
Duarte chairs an ISPP session on political bias: Bilewicz on status vs. liberal bias; Duarte on ideological assumptions that quietly wreck study validity.
Read Article →Ideologically-fueled research
Some psychologists pathologize non-leftists to resolve dissonance. System-justification and green “denial” items smuggle values into purported facts.
Read Article →Call for examples of politically-biased research
Wanted: social-science studies that bake ideology into measures. Caricature scales like RWA and SDO, rarely endorsed yet tied to conservatives, qualify.
Read Article →Scientific American column on Duarte et al
Valdesolo covers the BBS paper well. Openness and RWA scales encode urban-left taste; conservatives rarely endorse the cartoon items treated as “high.”
Read Article →Thoughts on Gelman comment
Political homogeneity threatens social-science validity because ideologies smuggle human-nature assumptions into measures. Diversity is an epistemic tool.
Read Article →Don’t be a skeptic / the noun problem
Prefer the adjective: be skeptical of a claim, not “a skeptic.” Nouns become tribes. Evidence can move; identities resist. “Denier” is not a trait.
Read Article →How not to report science
Scientific American attacked Nic Lewis on aerosol forcing without quoting him. One-sided climate coverage is advocacy, not science journalism.
Read Article →Spending money on experiences instead of objects makes you happier
Experiences beat objects for 57% of people--and things won for 34%. Happiness headlines hide large minorities; the spend-on-trips advice is not universal.
Read Article →The “hottest year on record” fallacy
On a temperature plateau, any year has a decent shot at “hottest on record.” That slogan does not refute a pause; some scientists botched the probability.
Read Article →Why eight fingers would (probably) increase Type-1 error
A base-8 culture would likely set alpha at “0.04,” equal to 0.0625 in base-10. Looser cutoffs would publish more false positives. Ten fingers shaped 0.05.
Read Article →p-values banned
Basic and Applied Social Psychology banned p-values and confidence intervals. Descriptive stats outrank inferential ones; a small p is not an effect.
Read Article →37.5%
Inbar and Lammers: 37.5% of social psychologists would discriminate against conservative job candidates. On committees that rate is likely career-ending.
Read Article →Hot off the presses
Two JPSP papers: Finkel et al. weigh false-positive reform against misses; Waytz et al. find that mental simulation raises reported meaning in life.
Read Article →Envy, social comparison, non-envy
Hostility to outspoken idealists often sounds like “she thinks she’s better than us.” That comparison sting resembles malicious envy and is understudied.
Read Article →SPSP; data
SPSP’s integrity symposium is a draw. Student samples weaken claims; invalid methods make data cheap. Field and workplace samples would travel farther.
Read Article →Sweet things
Latent class models beat linear correlations by keeping respondent profiles intact. Also needed: self-esteem scales that do not smuggle in narcissism.
Read Article →On fraud
Scientific fraud is deception, not only fake cells in a freezer. False titles the authors’ own spreadsheet refutes meet standard falsification tests.
Read Article →Methods
To learn why skeptics think as they do, read their own accounts--not a blog survey that ties them to moon-hoax items almost none of them endorse.
Read Article →Structure of Malpractice 1: The Frog Jump
The frog jump: correlate a lopsided agree/disagree scale, then report the empty opposite pole. Linear r on dichotomous items can invert the truth.
Read Article →Significance
Statistical significance is not binary. The 0.05 cutoff is a ten-finger convention for Type-1 control--not proof a hypothesis is true in nature.
Read Article →On prestige of universities vs. graduate programs
University brand is not graduate-program quality. ASU social psychology is elite; public-ivy prestige tracks undergrad selectivity, not the PhD shop.
Read Article →Comment on Verheggen et al.; climate consensus research
Verheggen et al. invited non-climate authors and cannot say who answered. Consensus research is often junk; valid surveys still show a real majority.
Read Article →I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views: reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science (Updated)
A PhD program rejected the author after a Jimmy Carter critique. Viewpoint discrimination harms validity; social science needs heterodox voices.
Read Article →How one paleo-participant can change the outcome of a study
A 32,757-year-old in Lewandowsky’s PLOS ONE file erased real age correlations. Minors stayed in; authors knew for a year and still reported false results.
Read Article →New Yorker article
Konnikova’s New Yorker piece frames the BBS paper as anti-Republican bias. The deeper problem is one academic subculture’s assumptions in methods.
Read Article →Heritability of academic prowess
Twin data put GCSE scores about 62% heritable, traits 35-58%. Heritability is variance explained, not destiny; ideas and settings can still shift it.
Read Article →Lewis and Curry
Lewis and Curry put climate sensitivity near 1.64C, far below many IPCC figures. If that holds, warming was overstated; ECS estimates keep moving.
Read Article →Your mileage may vary
Smiling raised happiness for some people and lowered it for others. Main effects mislead; a significant r can ride on a small slice of a sample.
Read Article →No results
Cook raters googled authors and mocked skeptics. Fraud plus an invalid method means there is no 97%--no number at all. Results require methods.
Read Article →Classifying words during sleep
Sleeping brains still sorted new animal vs. object words, Kouider’s EEG study found. Meaning extraction continued after subjects drifted off.
Read Article →The art of evasion
Cook’s team never answered the fraud case. They claimed blind, independent raters they did not use; without those methods, there are no results.
Read Article →Harms
Have you been harmed after being labeled a climate skeptic? The post asks whether Lewandowsky’s false hoax links leaked into work and dating.
Read Article →Medical records hacked
A 4.5-million-record hospital hack shows clinics lack real infosec. Assume records are compromised, and watch what you write on intake forms.
Read Article →Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males, and the 97%
Cook et al. coded stove surveys, housing papers, and TV-news studies as AGW endorsement. The 97% figure is fraudulent and should be retracted.
Read Article →Eyes in space
In-space 3-D printed mirrors could beat launch limits on telescopes. Bigger monolithic apertures would image exoplanet air and hunt for life.
Read Article →Kenny and The Castle
Australia’s comedies The Castle and Kenny radiate a beautiful sense of life. Both films treat everyday dignity with rare metaphysical optimism.
Read Article →Data is often overrated
Invalid studies need no new data to be vacated. Logic can refute Napier & Jost and Lewandowsky; more numbers cannot rescue a validity collapse.
Read Article →Reality is what it is
Unflattering findings about conservatives are not automatically invalid. Reality is whatever it is; Eidelman et al. looks methodologically clean.
Read Article →More fraud
Lewandowsky claimed free-marketeers reject HIV and smoking science. Data show 95-96% agreement; correlations turned assent into “rejection.”
Read Article →The greatest line ever
Life’s line “Maybe she’s a real angel with fake wings” models clean logic and optimism. It sidesteps the representativeness heuristic neatly.
Read Article →Lewandowsky fraud
Lewandowsky’s moon-landing title is false: 3 of 1,145 endorsed both hoaxes. The paper slanders skeptics and should be retracted as scientific fraud.
Read Article →Ignore climate consensus studies based on random people rating journal article abstracts.
Cook’s 97% paper counted stove surveys and psychology abstracts as climate endorsement. Activist raters cannot measure a scientific consensus.
Read Article →What’s going on with Paul Krugman?
Krugman invents a one-for-one GDP claim Pielke never made, then savages him. Disagreement is not stupidity; scholars should not revel in malice.
Read Article →But climate scientist so-and-so says it’s not a big deal...
Reading only dissenting climate scientists is confirmation bias. Weigh the majority view too; contrarians remain useful even if they are wrong.
Read Article →