Category: Social Science
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Structure of Malpractice 1: The Frog Jump
Here is a tiny preview of upcoming methodological work relevant to recent events: The Frog Jump You have two survey variables: Variable 1: ABVariable 2: CD AB: A and B are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts for A; 2 pts for B)CD: C and D are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts…
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Significance
I was struck by this quote from a Forbes piece on the secondhand smoke research. “there’s no such thing as borderline statistical significance. It’s either significant or it’s not.” It’s attributed to a journalist named Christopher Snowdon (I don’t know who that is.) It’s false, and I think it’s important for us to convey a…
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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)
Some of my mentors advised me to take down the post from July 22, 2014 about discrimination because it would hurt me in the job market – that hiring committees would discriminate against me (again) for my perceived political views, or would discriminate against me for documenting past discrimination. So I took it down last week.…
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How one paleo-participant can change the outcome of a study
Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) authored “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science” in PLOS ONE. (Paper here.) This study has many of the same features as their Psychological Science scam. In that study, they falsely linked belief in the moon-landing hoax to climate skepticism when in fact only three participants…
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New Yorker article
The New Yorker has a nice article about our BBS paper on the lack of intellectual diversity in social psychology. I cringe a bit at the title: Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans? This was never about political parties, and the lack of diversity goes much deeper than even political philosophy (conservative, liberal, libertarian — that…
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Heritability of academic prowess
Interesting work by Krapohl, et al. in PNAS. I love twin studies. They look comprehensively on the heritability of various factors that contribute to academic achievement, particularly performance on the British* GCSE exams administered during high school. They report that scores are 62% heritable, and that the different traits are from 35 – 58% heritable,…
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Your mileage may vary
This is great work: “As expected, across these experiments, the researchers found that the more people smiled, the happier they reported being. But only some people. Surprisingly, for a section of the population, smiling actually reduced well-being. The more these people smiled, the less happy they were. This is like finding that there are some diners who, after consuming a…
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Reality is what it is
Quick but important point of clarification… Someone sent me this paper as a presumed example of bias or invalid research: Eidelman, Scott, Christian S. Crandall, Jeffrey A. Goodman, and John C. Blanchar. 2012. “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38 (6): 808–20. (Link) I don’t see anything wrong with it. I…
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How data is often overrated
This is something I wrote some time ago, and have quickly updated. Data is overrated. This is a terrible, terrible thing for a scientist to say. Well, except that it’s true, so it’s a good thing for a scientist to say. I don’t question, remotely, the central empirical premise of social science or any other…
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More scams
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, G. E. (2013), titled their paper thusly: NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science. And in their abstract they say: “Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV…