Post: #1

Did some forum searching before posting this and I’m surprised this hasn’t been posted yet but DDoS probably played a part.


Last week, University of Virginia released the results of its Reproducibility Project which began in 2011. It found they were only about to recreate the 39 out of 100 experiments from published psychology studies. Further the effectiveness of repeating the experiments dropped as it shifted from cognitive psych to social psychology (bullshit)

Scientific America Wrote:Of interest, the authors found that some types of studies were more likely to be replicated than others. Only about 25 percent of the 57 social psychology studies included in the project were successfully replicated whereas 50 percent of the 43 cognitive psychology ones were. The social psychology studies also had weaker effect sizes. In addition, the simpler the design of the original experiment, the more reliable its results. The researchers also found that “surprising” effects were less reproducible.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...-research/

The project researchers cited 3 reasons for the issues:

Quote:1) Though most replication teams worked with the original authors to use the same materials and methods, small differences in when, where or how the replication was carried out might have influenced the results.
2) The replication might have failed, by chance, to detect the original result.
3) The original result might have been a false positive. [Cibo:Basically they fucked up]

http://as.virginia.edu/news/massive-coll...s-findings

Given that we know must of the research from psychology is usually about some SJW concern, it’s not surprising that immediately afterwards the liberal press went into damage control mode.

New York Times Wrote:As with any scientific field, psychology has some published studies that were conducted sloppily, and a few bad eggs who have falsified their data. But contrary to the implication of the Reproducibility Project, there is no replication crisis in psychology. The “crisis” may simply be the result of a misunderstanding of what science is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinio...risis.html

I don’t think anyone here is shocked with the outcomes of the project. Of course the media will latch onto the excuses that project researchers couldn’t completely replicate the test conditions or the chance issues reproducing an experiment as reasons for the results. But, the fact is even when the project did reproduce the experiment “successfully”, the effect was almost always less profound.

Also no one wants to mention the great joke that psychology experiments in general are all just done on bored, hungry college students that want the $10- $20 to be a test subject.

Post: #2

This study would basically mean that a psychological study by itself is not even enough to prove its phenomenon in a court. Civil cases alone require proof on the balance of probabilities, i.e. more than 50% sure generally. If only 39% of psychological studies can be reproduced, that would mean, statistically, that every psychological study is less likely than not to be true and not a random outlier.

Social sciences of all varieties -- social work, psychology, and psychiatry to the extent it's not biologically based -- are made up. Arguably they're not even science if you go strictly by Popper's view that a proposition is not scientific if it is not falsifiable. This is an important study to have in the back pocket whenever some feminist scumbag tries to back their conclusions with a single, obscure study that supposedly replicates its conclusions.

Post: #3

This is very interesting. It's unfortunate that every study is based on the assumption that it's 100% factual. Nowadays, most studies have the end result in mind and use that to create the experiment.

Too bad there isn't an independent body auditing all studies regardless of topic or who's funding it. An independent objective science board should be required to recreate every study before submitting the research to the publisher.

But we know that will never happen.

Post: #4

I have a feeling the more politically correct studies were more likely to fail reproducibility

Post: #5

There's a basic misunderstanding of the social sciences. While we use the word "science" as a catch all, it's really more profound than that, and to understand it fully we need to look at where our perception comes from.

The Greeks had three types of what we would refer to as science -

Episteme: This is what we typically think of as "hard" science; justified true belief. We all believe in gravity because we've seen it demonstrated countless times. This is the study of eternal truth.
Phronesis: The study of rationality. Figuring out what needs to be done and the best way to accomplish it. This is where social science should fall, but the research most often ends up never being utilized for the betterment of mankind. (Hence the typical thought that such research is a waste of time and effort.) We can know a difference between alpha and beta men (studying behavior), but if we don't act on it, we're just keyboard jockeys and easily dismissed as such. Same goes for social science.
Techne: The study of a craft or an art. Not concerned with eternal truths, but rather context dependent information.

Anyone who took a Poli Sci 101 should be able to tell you that social science is going to lead to results that are hard to reproduce. Ask anyone who's ever taken two polls asking the same questions at different times.