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Study: More Than Half of Psychological Results Can't Be Reproduced
Bruce66423 writes: A new study trying to replicate results reported in allegedly high quality journals failed to do so in over 50% of cases. Those of us from a hard science background always had our doubts about this sort of stuff — it's interesting to see it demonstrated — or rather, as the man says: 'Psychology has nothing to be proud of when it comes to replication,' Charles Gallistel, president of the Association for Psychological Science. Back in June a crowd-sourced effort to replicate 100 psychology studies had a 39% success rate.
Or this one from just under 2 weeks ago:
The requirement that medical researchers register in detail the methods they intend to use in their clinical trials, both to record their data as well as document their outcomes, caused a significant drop in trials producing positive results. From Nature: "The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000.
Big Pharma, in its chase for the ever mighty dollar, has made medical science into a farce of what it should be by now. Don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of progress made...but a lot of the information coming out from the companies backing the publishing of irreproducible results is leaving a large shadow over that progress; it's beginning to give me the perception that we're coming upon a plateau in our rate of advancement. It's also not easing my cynicism any.
It's interesting nonetheless seeing what studies come up as bunk and which get confirmed. For example, I opened up their data file and started pulling up random entries about gender differences for fun:
"Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?" - The original study claimed that while men often self-report having their selection criteria for a partner being a lot more hinged around appearance than women do, that in practice this isn't the case, and more to the point, people's self-reporting for what they want most in a partner has little bearing on what they actually find most important in partner selection in practice.
The re-analysis confirmed this study.
"Perceptual mechanisms that characterize gender differences in decoding women's sexual intent" - This was a followup study to an earlier study that claimed that women often perceive men's sexual interest as friendliness while men often perceive women's friendliness as sexual interest. This study found, by contrast, that while men often misperceive friendliness as sexual interest, they also often misperceive sexual interest as friendliness - that they're just worse in general than reading sexual interest than women.
The re-analaysis was thus in a way responding to both the original and the followup. And found neither to be true. They found no difference between men and women in ability to read sexual interest vs. friendliness.
"Loving those who justify inequality: the effects of system threat on attraction to women who embody benevolent sexist ideals." - this study was to test - and reported confirmation - of the hypothesis that men who don't trust the government will also tend to find attractive women who embody "benevolent sexist" stereotypes - that is, that women are vulnerable, need to be saved, belong in the house, are there to complete men, etc, vs. women who have interest in careers or activities outside of the family, expect to be seen as equals, etc.
The reanalysis showed no correlation at all.
"The Best Men Are (Not Always) Already Taken: Female Preference for Single Versus Attached Males Depends on Conception Risk" - this study claimed that women in relationships find single men more attractive when they're ovulating and partnered men when they're not, but that single women show no preference. They argued that this result is expected given selective factors.
The reanalysis showed no correlation at all in any of the above cases.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.