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Decoding Academia #2: False Positive Psychology *Video* (Patreon)

Published:
2021-12-27 10:53:28
Imported:
2026-06
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Not had enough content with the Christmas Special?

Well, here is the second instalment of the Decoding Academia series. This episode is on a classic 2011 paper on 'False Positive Psychology'. This was one of the harbingers of the replication crisis and shows how important the concept of 'Researchers Degrees of Freedom' are for critically evaluating research.

The discussion is a little bit technical at times but I hope some of you find it useful.

Interested in feedback as always! 

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year again!

- Copy of the article discussed attached to this post

Files

Decoding Academia #2: (Simmons, Nelson, & Simosohn, 2011)

We cover a classic paper on 'False Positive Psychology'. This was one of the harbingers of the replication crisis and shows how important the concept of 'Researchers Degrees of Freedom' are to critically evaluate research.

Comments

Sian Gibby

I am so excited about this series; thank you for doing it. Also thank you for making the paper available. Have you read Michael Lewis's book about David Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work, The Undoing Project? If you have a chance, I hope you will check it out, if not. Here is the description: "Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality."

Lilydale

Wow, what a super show! I learned so much, but I need to listen several times because there is so much in here. Thanks!

Kat

I don't quite get it. If you want to find out whether listening to certain music affects how old people actually are, don't you need to find out their age before as well as after they listen to the music? It's unclear that this was done. Perhaps there's a correlation, but there's absolutely no evidence of the causation, as implied by the abstract. You might just as well posit people's age caused which music the investigators chose for them to listen to. Edit: Oh, I get it. They used the father's age. That makes it OK then, I guess. But they could have just used the participant's age, it's not like they wouldn't have had one before listening to the music. Or maybe they could have just had them listen to the Beatles for a long, long time? And I think the mother's age would have been better anyway.

Kat

Good, there's evidence of psychic ability in the scientific literature. Don't tell the gurus.

Sian Gibby

At the risk of commenting too much let me say this paper and discussion helped me clarify some issues we deal with at the academic journal I work for. The field covered by my publication is a fairly new one, and it's been my experience that editors in it have not thus far accrued the power they have in other, especially more scientific, fields. The result being that when we critique a submission, the scholars are often shocked that we are assessing their work rigorously, as though publishing the best possible content on their topic were not in our shared interest! Speaking of which, I hope you will talk a bit more in future about responses to academic papers; I assume you mean for peer reviewers, but such a discussion will surely be useful for any number of people. Thanks!

Kat

At the risk of commenting too much myself, I think it would have been more interesting if listening to music had caused the fathers' ages to decrease. And I wonder if a single different answer to the square root of 100 would have been statistically significant? It would have been really, really interesting if listening to music caused a change in the square root of 100. But, I guess if you're doing studies like these, you have to take what pops out.