I don’t think it was a choice. I think it was a journalistic reflex — go for the personal, the emotional, because it draws in readers. The same reason they pepper stories about murder rates with profiles about individual murder victims. But in this particular case, it directed readers away from the real story. They came out feeling sympathetic with the Harvard scientist whose work had been (correctly, let us remember) called into question instead of gasping for air at the gaping hole that was staring them in the face. Cuddy’s reaction might be worth a paragraph, but here we got this lavish, heroic treatment of her hard childhood, her teenage car accident, her difficulties returning to school, and her rise, against all odds, to a Princeton PhD and a Harvard professorship. But that’s not the story. The story is that nearly all of the psychological research of the past 50+ years is now under a cloud of suspicion because we (nearly all) acted badly — sometimes disingenuously — with respect to statistical analysis. Instead of demanding that those who wanted the title of “scientist” really internalize the math, the probability theory, and the critical assumption that underlie data analysis, we turned it into a perfunctory "cookbook” that made it easy for people to think (or rationalize) that there were no real consequences for cutting corners — replacing butter with margarine, leaving out the dash of salt, trying to replace sugar with some sort of artificial sweetener — and what we ended up with was a hot mess that no one who is serious about these things can stomach anymore.
And it’s not as though any of this is new (though everyone who gets caught keeps saying they had never heard of it before). The computational facility that allows for the simulation studies of the past few years is new, but Paul Meehl and Jacob Cohen and David Bakan, and Jum Nunnally, and Bill Rozeboom. and Bob Rosenthal have all been telling us this stuff since the 1960s and 1970s (and through the 1980s and 1990s). (Heck, there are even couple of articles by a guy named Berkson from 1938 and 1942). But even most of the psychologists who bothered to read this material (I was lucky that it was assigned to me as an undergrad — Thanks TIPSter Stuart McKelvie!) decided to harumph and go on pretty much as before — a little worse each decade as the designs got more complex. It is a massive s#*t sandwich, and it threatens the credibility of not only psychology, but of a ton of medical research (classic cancer experiments aren’t replicating), not to mention the rest of the social/behavioral sciences (every single one of which — except economics — shows an explicable hump just inside the .05 p-value, when you survey the literature — graph here: https://twitter.com/jtleek/status/890180014733492225). And we’re suppose to focus on poor Amy Cuddy’s feelings? The thing is (for those of you inclined to think that this is “really” a gender issue), Cuddy is way old news now. Brian Wansink’s food lab at Cornell is having to correct and retract dozens of articles — research that has already been (mis-)used to change the practices of school cafeterias and the like. For heaven’s sake, he was so “sloppy" that one of his most famous studies on the eating behaviour of 8-11 year olds turned out to have actually been run on 4-5 year olds! I wouldn't expect him or his lab to last another year. There are half a dozen other prominent labs under scrutiny of this kind as well. Psychology is in deep trouble. Much worse than we know yet, especially once the politicians who hate social science already get ahold of it. Amy Cuddy’s feelings won’t amount to a hill of beans once the full scale of this thing is understood. Chris ….. Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 43.773895°, -79.503670° chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo orcid.org/0000-0002-6027-6709 ………………………………... On Oct 21, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Michael Palij <m...@nyu.edu> wrote: > > > > > > On Fri, 20 Oct 2017 20:03:43 -0700, Christopher Green wrote: > > >Interesting article, but I thought it made the usual journalistic error > >of personalizing the story too much, making readers come away > >feeling for the people instead of understanding the problem. > > Although I agree that there is too much personalization (I believe > this is done so that the reader can (a) see the person described > as more as a relatable person), and (b) borrowing some of the > writing conventions from fiction to make what would be a dry > nonfiction story more interesting. In an article like this, I can accept > it. However, after a long hiatus, I am teaching Introduction to Psych > and find that the textbook is filled with too many personalized examples > or what I would call "cutesy" examples that to simplify the presentation > and make it more accessible to undergraduates. I think that this > helps students maybe to understand the presentation (or develop > the illusion of understanding) which will be challenged when they try > to read actual empirical research articles (e.g., "hey, where's the main > character? Where's the dramatic action and tension? etc.). > > That being said, from a 'qualitative research" perspective, I think > it is interesting to see what a person who has published a piece of > research that cannot be replicated is feeling and thinking. Amy > Cuddy appear to be a highly capable and skilled person who though > she has given up on academia (at least for now) will make out > all right (kinda like John B. Watson, if you know what I mean). > > The larger issue of the replication crisis, the pressures to publish > popular (to the general public not the scientific community) articles, > and to get external funding, I think, will be lost on the general reader. > Seeing how these factors affect a likable character is perhaps the > only way to show what these factors are and can do to a person. > > Another thing to keep in mind is that this article uses a person who > is basically good but was incautious. It might have been more > interesting if the person being covered was Diederik Stapel who > seems to be a much darker person and who appears to have inentionally > done bad things. > > One could say that bad science arises from good people doing > "incompetent" research and "bad" people doing fraudulent research, > among other things (e.g., following fads that focus on the weong things). > > -Mike Palij > New York University > m...@nyu.edu > > --- > > You are currently subscribed to tips as: chri...@yorku.ca. > > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62bd92&n=T&l=tips&o=51592 > > (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) > > or send a blank email to > leave-51592-430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62b...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > > > > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. 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