Psychology

More clutter building up in the inbox about the unreproducible results from social sciences: From ScienceDaily: Today, in Nature Human Behavior, a collaborative team of five laboratories published the results of 21 high-powered replications of social science experiments originally published in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious journals in science. They failed to replicate the results of more than a third of the studies and turned up significantly weaker evidence for the remainder compared to the original studies. Paper. (open access) – Colin F. Camerer, Anna Dreber, Felix Holzmeister, Teck-Hua Ho, Jürgen Huber, Magnus Johannesson, Michael Kirchler, Gideon Nave, Brian A. Nosek, Thomas Pfeiffer, Adam Altmejd, Nick Buttrick, Taizan Chan, Yiling Chen, Eskil Forsell, Anup Gampa, Emma Heikensten, Lily Read More ›

That’s a big part of the problem with peer review and replication failures. Don’t believe me? Get this: In response to massive failures in so-called social sciences: “The findings reinforce the roles that two inherent intuitions play in scientific decision-making: our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data regardless of its quality or relevance, and our inclination to seek patterns in data whether they exist or not,” he says. Dingledine also says the results speak to a bigger problem, something Kahneman famously described in an open letter to colleagues in 2012 as a “train wreck looming”: the widespread failure to replicate the findings of many important studies in the social sciences. That wreck may well be upon us. Paul Read More ›

If you also think that data is a source of information, that is. And have to live in the real world. … a survey of 479 sociology professors found that only 4 per cent identified as conservative or libertarian, while 83 per cent identified as liberal or left-radical. In another survey — of psychologists this time — only 6 per cent identified as ‘conservative overall’. Just occasionally, though, a more balanced study does slip through the net — like the one just published by a team from Oxford University. The study by Nathan Cofnas et al — Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? — pours scorn on the idea that conservatives are any more anti-science Read More ›

At Current Biology: Teleological thinking — the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities — has long been identified as a cognitive hindrance to the acceptance of evolution, yet its association to beliefs other than creationism has not been investigated. Here, we show that conspiracism — the proneness to explain socio-historical events in terms of secret and malevolent conspiracies — is also associated to a teleological bias. Across three correlational studies (N > 2000), we found robust evidence of a teleological link between conspiracism and creationism, which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness. As a resilient ‘default’ component of early cognition, teleological thinking is thus Read More ›

Even while prominent people in that field are coming to terms with the problem. From a New York Times science writer: It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and world-famous outside of psychology — because they dramatized something people recognized in themselves and in others. They live in the common culture as powerful metaphors, explanations for aspects of our behavior that we sense are true and that are captured somehow in a laboratory mini-drama constructed by an inventive researcher, or research team. Huh? Whether many people recognized something in themselves or not, the experiments Read More ›

From Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire: You’ve undoubtedly seen those preening headlines from major outlets about how conservatives are more “authoritarian” by nature than Leftists. See, for example, here and here and here and here and here and here. But it turns out that this is nonsense. Such studies are generally vague and deliberately constructed to make it appear that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than Leftists. In reality, authoritarian personality types exist across the political spectrum. All you have to do is change the incentive structure in the questions, and you’ll suddenly find Leftists who hate freedom and conservatives who love it. Jesse Singal of New York Magazine has a long and worthwhile piece about the scientific flaws in the authoritarian modeling. … Confirmation bias has allowed too many members of the Left to ignore embarrassing Read More ›

From Mark Fischetti at Scientific American: Bipolar disorder, for example, was more similar to schizophrenia than to major depression even though clinicians may link bipolar disorder and depression, based on their symptoms. These insights could possibly reveal new treatments, says neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the investigators. More. It’s becoming increasingly evident (see the stories below) that a great deal of what we need to know about a person (or any life form) is not in their genes. See also: At PLOS: “Genes – way weirder than you thought” Bale monkeys more closely related to sister species than same species in different locationsThe “biological species concept” is yet another textbook dead zone. Girl Read More ›

From Christie Aschwanden at Five Thirty Eight: In part one, the researchers presented 2,560 participants2 with 306 abstracts related to political beliefs or behavior drawn from 10 years’ worth of Society for Personality and Social Psychology meetings. Raters were asked to assess how the research characterized political conservatives and political liberals. They were also asked the extent to which conservatives were the target of “explanation.” Suppose, for instance, a study finds that conservatives are less likely to change their opinions on moral issues than liberals are when exposed to counterarguments. “The researchers could explain this as ‘conservatives are cognitively rigid, inflexible, and resistant to new arguments,’ ” said Eric Luis Uhlmann, a psychologist at INSEAD in Singapore and the study’s Read More ›

From Wintery Knight Here’s a lecture by New York University professor Paul Vitz to explain a connection between atheism and fatherlessness: Wintery Knight also suggests an article by Paul Copan which points out how father presence/absence and father quality affects belief and disbelief in God: Seventh, the attempt to psychologize believers applies more readily to the hardened atheist.It is interesting that while atheists and skeptics often psychoanalyze the religious believer, they regularly fail to psychoanalyze their ownrejection of God. Why are believers subject to such scrutiny and not atheists? Remember another feature of Freud’s psychoanalysis — namely, an underlying resentment that desires to kill the father figure. Why presume atheism is the rational, psychologically sound, and default position while theism Read More ›

From Ben Blum at Medium: Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” [1973] in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story. Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at ENST: Writing at The Conversation, psychology professor Jeremy Shapiro at Case Western Reserve University proffers his opinion on why many laypeople doubt the scientific consensus on questions such as climate change and biological evolution:  As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder. Dr. Shapiro seems not to have read much writing by ID theorists and it is a good bet he has not done psychotherapy with them. He goes on to explain: Read More ›

Software developer Brendan Dixon writes in response to physicist Rob Sheldon who was recently heard to scoff at the idea that self-driving cars will catch on. Rob Sheldon: The guys building the technology, like the fellow in Florida who died in a Tesla doing 75mph on Autopilot, are “first adopters”. They really want the future to be now. Most of us just want to get to work without the hassle of fighting the traffic. And honestly, it takes a lot of brainpower to shave 5 minutes off the commute. Why would I use a safety conscious computer that will never bend the traffic rules? The car is a tool, not an end in itself. And now, Brendan Dixon: I do not Read More ›

It goes downhill from there. If I were a Darwinian, I would be embarrassed by this stuff. From Jeremy E Sherman at Psychology Today: I’m an atheist with a PhD. in evolutionary theory. I spend much of my time encouraging a new relationship with religion and spirituality modeled on our relationship with fiction. For example, I wish that Christians believed in Christ the way they believe in Santa Claus, as a fictional character based loosely on a historical one, reconfigured to embody a first-cut simplification of Christian values for kids that remains vivid and valued by nostalgic and conscientious adults. Most of the world, for whatever reason, continues to distinguish between apparent truth and admitted fiction. Now, as to Sherman’s main Read More ›

From Jeremy P. Shapiro, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, at Raw Story: Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways. … As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder. … This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Randa Jarrar, an English professor at Fresno State, is rightfully in hot water. In a Twitter tirade, she called the recently deceased Barbara Bush an “amazing racist” and said she was “happy the witch is dead.” For good measure, she wished death upon the rest of the Bush Family. Let’s set aside the issues of free speech and tenure to focus on a bigger underlying concern: The psychology of pure, unadulterated hatred. How does a person become so consumed with animosity for a fellow human being? Apparently, the subject has been studied, and Berezow provides some helpful pointers from an FBI analyst: Though his article is about the behavior of hate groups, such as Neo-Nazis, Read More ›