Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided

indian_rediff writes "An article from Friday's Wall Street Journal (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) details how some of the research being done by scientists ends up simply stating the obvious. Their observations make for some interesting and hilarious reading." From the article: "Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key,' researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown."

Comments

counterpoint cabal

[globaljustin]

You, parent, and the whole /. counterpoint cabal need to relax. You don't have to provide b.s. counterpoints to every popular thread just for the sake of being a contrarian...

You and parent are also wrong.

And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time.

There IS a such thing as stupid research. For example, from TFA:

In what its sponsors called a "landmark study," scientists found that when your fingers are numb and turning that lovely robin's-egg blue, you make more typing effors. Er, errors. "When employees get chilly," the scientists concluded, "they are not working to their full potential."

Can you tell me one logical reason why anyone might think that people with stiff, cold fingers would not make more typing errors than people with normal fingers? That's the point of the whole thing: only an idiot would need to test that hypothesis. That's like testing to decide if people who read non-fiction often like non-fiction.

There are some things that do not need to be tested with methodology to be agreed as true. You don't need a study to find out that shooting yourself in the head will hurt you.

Wait, maybe you should test out that hypothesis...

Re:Reminded of a Quote

[Comatose51]

When I posted check this out, I meant to link: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkersh adow_illusion.html