Posted on 10/13/2015 6:02:01 AM PDT by Heartlander
One morning in August, the social science reporter for National Public Radio, a man named Shankar Vedantam, sounded a little shellshocked. You couldn’t blame him.
Like so many science writers in the popular press, he is charged with reporting provocative findings from the world of behavioral science: “. . . and researchers were very surprised at what they found. The peer-reviewed study suggests that [dog lovers, redheads, Tea Party members] are much more likely to [wear short sleeves, participate in hockey fights, play contract bridge] than cat lovers, but only if [the barometer is falling, they are slapped lightly upside the head, a picture of Jerry Lewis suddenly appears in their cubicle . . . ].”
I’m just making these up, obviously, but as we shall see, there’s a lot of that going around.
On this August morning Science magazine had published a scandalous article. ... Behavioral psychology is a wellspring of modern journalism. It is the source for most of those thrilling studies that keep reporters like Vedantam in business.
Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same findings is supposed to be a cornerstone of scientific knowledge. It’s the way to separate real information from flukes and anomalies.
These 100 studies had cleared the highest hurdles that social science puts up. They had been...reviewed by panels of peers,.. published,...and taken by other social scientists as the starting point for further experiments. Except . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
When it comes to these “groundbreaking” psychological studies just keep in mind that the biochemistry of human thought is not understood. These “studies” and they way they are statistically analyzed almost always reflect the bias or agenda of the “researchers” and can almost never be replicated by independent people. Also be very wary of medical “studies” that are underwritten by the pharmacutal industry that inevitably has a strong vested interest in the outcome.
I don’t think much about behavioral sciences of people.
The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."
Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."
Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says,
"What do you want it to equal"?
Ping.
ink is costing me, but I need hard copy to study and notate when I speak before the school board about their silly and dangerous social re-engineering tactics
Oh my. Psychology is a scam? Whodathunk?
I took time to read the entire article. Devastating to Libs.
Thanks for posting.
Oldplayer
LOL
Yes, I did.
Nobody seems to recognize that 83.658% of all statistics are just plain made up.
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