Psychology

From Uri Harris at Quillette: What is particularly striking about this shift is that the number of moderates has dropped sharply among professors. … From Bankston’s description, it seems clear that any non-leftist would find working in sociology almost unbearable. The research in the original paper suggests that the leftward shift in social science is likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. More. We all knew this but why persist with the pretense that these disciplines are any kind of sciences at all? And why should they be publicly funded? See also: All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences

From Skeptic Reading Room: The Hoax The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial. That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it. This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim Read More ›

From Jesse Singal at New York Mag: Perhaps no new concept from the world of academic psychology has taken hold of the public imagination more quickly and profoundly in the 21st century than implicit bias — that is, forms of bias which operate beyond the conscious awareness of individuals. That’s in large part due to the blockbuster success of the so-called implicit association test, which purports to offer a quick, easy way to measure how implicitly biased individual people are. When Hillary Clinton famously mentioned implicit bias during her first debate with Donald Trump, many people knew what she was talking about because the IAT has spread the concept so far and wide. It’s not a stretch to say that Read More ›

Pot. Kettle. Rusty. From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data. Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Anti-vaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only Read More ›

And birds still fly forwards too, no less. From Jesse Singal at New York Magazine: a paper published last month in Current Psychology by Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University and Jeffrey Brown and Amanda Torres of Texas A&M, the authors evaluated a bunch of psychology textbooks to see how rigorously they covered a bunch of controversial or frequently misrepresented subjects. The results weren’t great. In spring of 2012, Ferguson and his colleagues solicited and received 24 popular introductory textbooks, and then got to work evaluating them. Specifically, they evaluated those textbooks’ coverage of seven “controversial ideas in psychology” — ideas where there’s genuine mainstream disagreement among researchers — and also checked for the presence of five well-known scientific urban legends Read More ›

Yes, they are still grousing about that. And, from a distance, they sound surreal. From Dan Jones at New Scientist: In November, Donald Trump defied the pollsters to be elected the 45th US president. A few months earlier, UK voters decided to end their country’s 43-year membership of the European Union. Throughout Europe populist movements are prospering. In every case, opponents have cried foul: these campaigns, they argue, win support by distorting or flagrantly disregarding the truth. But wait. Doesn’t the losing side always say that, in every case? Vote for Doofus instead of Duffus and you’ll soon be hearing from the Duffites that Doofus won by “distorting or flagrantly disregarding the truth.” Much of the electorate is older now Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A subtle change occurred in our evolutionary history 100,000 years ago which allowed people who thought and behaved differently – such as individuals with autism – to be integrated into society, academics from the University of York have concluded. The change happened with the emergence of collaborative morality – an investment in the well-being of everyone in the group – and meant people who displayed autistic traits would not only have been accepted but possibly respected for their unique skills. It is likely our ancestors would have had autism, with genetics suggesting the condition has a long evolutionary history. Okay, so morality emerged and people who were different were not just cast out. But… Many people with autism Read More ›

Yes, now for something completely ridiculous: From Margaret Wente at Canada’s Globe and Mail: I learned about the true meaning of the pumpkin-spiced latte in a scholarly paper, called The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins. It was peer-reviewed and published in a genuine academic journal. Lisa Jordan Powell, its lead author, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. “Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes,” it warns. They make up just one part of the “pumpkin entertainment complex, whose multiple manifestations continue the entanglements of pumpkins, social capital, race, and place.” Ms. Powell (who did not respond to an offer to comment on her paper) is merely one of countless academics Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: … if anyone tells you that there is no broad consensus that social science is in deep trouble because of progressive bias, you can assume that they haven’t been keeping up with the stats. Unfortunately, when asked to reform by adding diverse voices, social scientists opt for any strategy other than inclusiveness, almost as if they were old-fashioned segregationists. That is, they want to “subtract out bias” all on their own, without adding new voices. Of course, if that had worked, they could have done it decades ago. Part of the problem, as the Regnerus controversy demonstrated, is that so many of their beliefs conflict not so much with tradition as with reality. Commentator Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: Social science, our “science of us”, is more susceptible to self-deception than other sciences. It is very much softer than particle physics and it has been especially hard hit by recent scandals. One factor may be the almost universally admitted progressive bias that makes frauds and hoaxes easy to perpetrate. There’s a technical term for that: “confirmation bias”, a tendency to attach more weight to evidence that confirms one’s own view. Much social science research seems to exist in order to provide evidence for theses that are already believed because they confirm the progressive worldview of the researchers. This background is helpful in understanding the fate of whistleblowers in the field, including Mark Regnerus (an Read More ›

For more than 50 years, psychologists have worried about the robustness of research in their field. … Last year, psychologist Brian Nosek led a consortium of nearly 300 scientists who published the first attempt to estimate the reproducibility rate in psychology by redoing 98 recent studies. The scientists couldn’t reproduce the initial results about 60 percent … ” More So forget about it.

In “Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance,” danah boyd at Chronicle Review: My path of inquiry, like that of most scientists, was shaped by the context in which I was operating. As a queer woman trying to sort out sexuality and identity, questions about gender felt natural. I was also a computer scientist at the time, but I knew that computer-science methods could not help me answer my question. So I embarked on a path that forced me to learn psychology, cognitive science, and gender studies. And, as a result, I began a lifelong battle to define my disciplinary identity. Am I a sociologist? An anthropologist? An internet-studies scholar? In the process, I quickly realized that I queered my disciplinary identity Read More ›

From Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn at Frontiers in Medicine, reviewing The Logic of Madness: A New Theory of Mental Illness … It is rational behavior in response to a compound misunderstanding of various emotions. The starting point of Blakeway’s theory is a basic algorithm that converts an emotion into an action that optimizes biological fitness. Depending upon the circumstances, an action state is driven by the emotion having the highest calculated value. He divides emotions into four categories, basic survival (e.g., fear, hunger), reproductive (e.g., lust, jealousy), social (e.g., guilt, anger), and strategic (e.g., anxiety, regret). Most of these biologically derived emotions are shared with other animals, especially chimpanzees, although there is the question of whether other animals can perform tactical Read More ›

From Hilda Bastian at PLOS: Here’s an example of what this means for a body of studies. I looked at this meta-analysis on changing implicit bias when l was researching for a recent blog post. It sounds like a solid base from which to draw conclusions: 427 studies with 63,478 participants. But 84% of the participants are college students, 66% female, and 55% from the USA. They’re nearly all very short-term studies (95%), 85% had no measures of behavior in them, and 87% had no pre-test results. More. In short, they might as well have been just three studies by profs who know each other. See also: Peer review Keep up to date with Retraction Watch Follow UD News at Read More ›

From Pacific Standard magazine: The results revealed that scientists are perceived as more likely than members of other groups to commit certain, but not all, moral transgressions. Specifically, they were viewed as more likely to engage in serial murder, incest, and necrobestiality, but not more likely to cheat or abuse others. This is best understood in the context of the Moral Foundations Theory, which asserts ethical norms can be categorized into two broad classifications: “individualizing” ones, which prohibit harming others and encourage fairness for all; and “binding” ones, which are based on notions of purity, loyalty, and deference to authority. Broadly speaking, the first set guides liberals’ moral thinking, while the second resonates with social conservatives. The transgressions the scientists Read More ›