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Psychology

Who wants to pay taxes for social sciences?

Aw, maybe it keeps social scientists off the streets. From Protein Wisdom: Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology. Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to Read More ›

Bees and ants provide clue to human suicides?

From Science Daily: Could human suicide have evolutionary roots in self-sacrificial behaviors like those seen in species such as honeybees and ants? … In a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Review, the researchers theorize that humans exhibit the characteristics of eusocial species such as relying on multigenerational and cooperative care of young and utilizing division of labor for successful survival. “Humans are a species that is eusocial, and that’s an important starting point,” Joiner said. “That suggests a certain set of characteristics, including some really striking self-sacrifice behaviors.” Those eusocial behaviors, understood as part of what is called inclusive fitness in evolutionary biology, are adaptive. “The idea is if you give up yourself, which would include your genes, Read More ›

“Power pose” is shoddy statistics science?

From Slate: Amy Cuddy’s famous finding is the latest example of scientific overreach. Consider the case of Amy Cuddy. The Harvard Business School social psychologist is famous for a TED talk, which is among the most popular of all time, and now a book promoting the idea that “a person can, by assuming two simple one-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful.” The so-called “power pose” is characterized by “open, expansive postures”—Slate’s Katy Waldman described it as akin to “a cobra rearing and spreading its hood to the sun, or Wonder Woman with her legs apart and her hands on her hips.” In a published paper from 2010, Cuddy and her collaborators Dana Carney and Andy Yap report Read More ›

The Left’s war on science?

Hmmm. Last circus that blew through town was hollering about the Right’s war on science. So far as we can see, there is no war. it’s more that some sciences are running out of feet to shoot themselves in. Not an easy job to recruit for even in hard times. 😉 Meanwhile, from the UK Spectator: The witch hunt against Napoleon Chagnon shows us what happens if scientists challenge the core beliefs of ‘progressives’ You don’t say. How much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of growing scientific evidence that many of its core beliefs are false? … Chagnon is a key figure in a new book by Alice Dreger, an American academic who has spent the Read More ›

Breaking: Conservative social psychologists spotted

From Jonathan Haidt at Heterodox Academy: New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists A new data set has come in. Bill von Hippel and David Buss surveyed the membership of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. That’s a professional society composed of the most active researchers in the field who are at least five years post-PhD. It’s very selective – you must be nominated by a current member and approved by a committee before you can join. Von Hippel and Buss sent a web survey to the 900 members of SESP and got a response rate of 37% (335 responses). So this is a good sample of the mid-level and senior people (average age 51) who produce most Read More ›

Why social science is riddled with “flaky research and questionable theories”

Because “ Graduate students were entering the field in order to change the world rather than discover truths. ” For last night’s party theme, the news desk chose EMS Crying Towel!: Liberals attacking social sciences. If it weren’t for the misunderstandings and mistrust that social scientists have inflicted by widely publicized fake data, one would almost feel sorry for people so friendless. But then the frog pitied the scorpion too, and … Anyway, from the Inbox: How a rebellious scientist uncovered the surprising truth about stereotypes … Left-wing bias, he said, was undermining his field. Graduate students were entering the field in order to change the world rather than discover truths. Because of this, he said, the field was riddled Read More ›

EMS Crying Towel! Liberals attacking social sciences

From New York Mag: At its core, Galileo’s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide — specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn’t fit into an activist community’s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger’s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry. When Dreger criticizes liberal politicization of science, she isn’t doing so from the seat of a trolling conservative. Well before she dove into some of the biggest controversies in science and activism, she earned her progressive bona fides. … We should want researchers to poke around at the edges of “respectable” beliefs about gender and race and religion and sex Read More ›

Do twins inherit an equal amount of “smartness”?

No, apparently. Lifestyle choices matter too, especially exercise. From Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times: As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declines in memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old. But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment Read More ›

Psychology does not speak the language of statistics very well

… which is why it isn’t really a science. From Tim Hartsfield at RealClearScience: Statistics Shows Psychology Is Not Science Alex [Berezow] and I have previously detailed what we believe are the requirements for calling a field of study science: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled conditions, reproducibility, and finally, predictability and testability. The failure of psychology (and indeed many other so-called social “sciences”) to meet these criteria often manifests as an obvious symptom: lousy statistics. Statistics is just a language. Like other languages it can be harnessed to express logical points in a consistent way, or it can demonstrate poorly reasoned ideas in a sloppy way. Statistical studies in psychology limp off the runway wounded by poor quantifiability, take Read More ›

The incredible shrinking social sciences

From the Weekly Standard: The behavioral sciences scandal On this August morning Science magazine had published a scandalous article. The subject was the practice of behavioral psychology. 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 Read More ›

Correcting for “liberal” slant in social psych? Huh?

From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty: How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology? Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect. There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information. The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do. Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals. When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up. Let’s Read More ›

Psychology, we are told, is NOT in crisis

In, where else, the New York Times: An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape. But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works.More. Unless it is happening most of the time. Presumably, the spinmistress heard about this: only one-third of published psychology research is reliable Sure,  and that guy Read More ›

Science journalist suffers chronic abuse syndrome

First, only one-third of published psychology research is reliable. How do we respond? We sort of knew that but, from the Conversation: What does it mean if the majority of what’s published in journals can’t be reproduced? Publishing together as the Open Science Collaboration and coordinated by social psychologist Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, research teams from around the world each ran a replication of a study published in three top psychology journals – Psychological Science; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. To ensure the replication was as exact as possible, research teams obtained study materials from the original authors, and worked closely with these authors whenever they Read More ›

Psychiatry: The trouble with being mad in North America…

… is that, at times, you’re saner than many pundits. Further to Terms to retire from psychological science (Perry: Many terms commonly used in psychology, psychiatry and related fields “should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats”): A new book by Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove, Psychiatry Under the Influence, investigates how the influence of pharmaceutical money and guild interests has corrupted the behavior of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry during the past 35 years. The book documents how the psychiatric establishment regularly misled the American public about what was known about the biology of mental disorders, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, and the safety and efficacy of its drugs. It also looks at Read More ›

Terms to retire from psychological science

From MinnPost: Many common psychology terms are ‘inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous or logically confused,’ experts claim Many terms commonly used in psychology, psychiatry and related fields — such as chemical imbalance, love molecule, and autism epidemic — “should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats,” according to a recent paper in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology. Although the article is aimed at health-care professionals, it’s a fascinating and helpful read for the rest of us as well. For it provides detailed explanations of why each of the 50 listed words and phrases is either “inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, [or] logically confused.” And those explanations will probably surprise many readers. Example are offered, including: Love molecule. Read More ›