José Duarte, PhD

Author: admin

  • Call for examples of politically-biased research

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    We’re looking for examples of politically-biased research in social science. The fields we’re most interested in are political psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and economics, but any example from social science would be appreciated. Please send them to [email protected]. A canonical form of bias would be cases where the researchers embed their political ideologies into…

  • Scientific American column on Duarte et al

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    Research psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo wrote a nice guest column on our BBS paper over at Scientific American. Scientific American doesn’t let me comment on their website, rejecting it as spam, even on a new account. This has been true for months – I’m not sure what’s triggering the spam flag. Maybe length. I’ve pasted a…

  • Thoughts on Gelman comment

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    I posted this comment in reply to Andrew Gelman’s post on his website. Neil Gross and Gelman have submitted a Comment to our upcoming BBS paper. I’ll have a lot more to say about our paper in the coming months, especially when it’s officially published:——————————————————————————————————————– Hi Andrew, Thanks for your Comment. A few thoughts:1) We…

  • Don’t be a skeptic / the noun problem

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    I don’t think you should be a skeptic. Not on the severity of human-caused warming, the safety of GMOs, or a few other things. Consider: 1. I’m a skeptic. — or — 2. I’m skeptical of the predictive power of climate science at this point. When you choose the noun, you’ve chosen membership in a…

  • How not to report science

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    I was disappointed to see this article by Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Scientific American: How to Misinterpret Climate Change Research. It’s an attempt to defang the recent surge of interest in Bjørn Stevens’ aerosol forcing estimates. To some people, those estimates imply a lower estimate of ECS, and a reduced likelihood of the more extreme future warming scenarios…

  • Spending money on experiences instead of objects makes you happier

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    This is a popular idea, has gotten good coverage, most recently in FastCo. Leaf Van Boven has been doing great work on this for years. (He was Gilovich’s graduate student – the FastCo article quotes Gilovich a lot because it’s based on a new review article by Gilovich & Kumar.)One of the things I want…

  • The “Hottest year on record” fallacy

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    2014 was the hottest year on record by some hundredths of a degree. It was not significantly hotter than 2005 or 2010. See the Berkeley BEST lab for details. Global surface warming paused or slowed down after 1998 – there is some dispute about whether to call it a pause or a slowdown. We’ll treat…

  • Why eight fingers would (probably) increase Type-1 error

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    In a comment on my post on Significance, I discovered that our rate of published Type-1 error in science would probably be higher if humans had eight fingers instead of ten. Type-1 error is when we wrongly reject the null hypothesis – when our studies seem to give us evidence of an effect or link…

  • p-values banned

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    This is so refreshing. The Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology has banned p-values. And confidence intervals. Their reasons are extremely good reasons, and well-articulated. I forgot to stress this point explicitly in the recent essay on the Lewandowsky fraud, but descriptive statistics always trump inferential. A p-value has no inherent substantive meaning, nor…

  • 37.5%

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    I don’t think I fully processed the implications of the Inbar and Lammers data. 37.5% of social psychologists in their survey explicitly reported a willingness to discriminate against conservative job candidates. These are people who chose the midpoint or higher, where the midpoint was Somewhat inclined to favor a liberal vs. conservative candidate. The 37.5% figure…