21–30 of 36 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not much of a psychologist, but I can see at least one paper by Khaneman, who won the economics Nobel for that sort of stuff. So not sure if you're being sarcastic or not?
20 of the 28 are from this decade which hardly makes them classics. Nothing from the 50s, for example. This list isn't The List.
List of studies, and the outcome: 1 Direction & SES (Huang et al., 2014) p 2 Structure and goal-pursuit (Kay et al., 2014) p=0.97 3 Incidental disfluency (Alter et al., 2007) p=0.67 4 Moral Foundations (Graham et al., 2009) p 5 Affect and Risk (Rottenstreich & Hsee, 2001) p=0.77 6 Priming consumerism (Bauer et al., 2012) p=0.15 7 Correspondence Bias (Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002) p 8 Disgust & Homophobia (Inbar et al.,…
This makes it different than many other science experiments where concrete parts of reality are tested.
Psychology really only tests the minds of humans in a global society at a point in time. If future minds change enough the results may no longer be valid.
Some of them were obvious (#3 - no, using a bad font does not make people answer questions more carefully; #22 - yes, people attribute more responsibility to adults than to babies). But there were some big surprises for me:
#6 - Participants read a hypothetical water conservation dilemma, then rate how much they trust the people in the scenario to conserve water. Sometimes the people are called "consumers" and sometimes "individuals". Does it make a difference? Apparently yes. When they're called "consumers", you expect them to conserve significantly less water than when they're "individuals".
#24 - if you ask "How satisfied are you with your relationship?" and then "How satisfied are you with your life-as-a-whole?", are the results more highly correlated than if you ask those questions in the opposite order? I thought for sure they would be - relationship happiness is one of several contributing factors to your overall happiness, so if it's fresh on your mind, you'll weigh it more heavily when you answer the life-as-a-whole question. Apparently not.
The thing with psychology experiments is that the fundamental thing being tested is not immutable. This makes it different than many other science experiments where concrete parts of reality are tested. Psychology really only tests the minds of humans in a global society at a point in time. If future minds change enough the results may no longer be valid.
"It was surprising that even with these efforts we were only able to obtain support for the original findings for half of the studies. These results do not definitively mean that the original findings were wrong, but they do suggest that they are not as robust as might have been assumed." - Michelangelo Vianello, one of the project leads. Yes, yes they do. It's ok to say the original findings were wrong. It's ok to r…
The thing with psychology experiments is that the fundamental thing being tested is not immutable. This makes it different than many other science experiments where concrete parts of reality are tested. Psychology really only tests the minds of humans in a global society at a point in time. If future minds change enough the results may no longer be valid.
I am not a Psychologist but I can give one example: Piaget hypothesized that the mind developed by first accumulating low-level sensory/motor data, and then progressively building higher levels of abstraction on that foundation. If that is true, then that process itself is not related to society or culture and should be observable so long as the biology underpinning cognitive development doesn't radically change.
Fun game: read through the summary of each experiment (psyarxiv.com/9654g) and try to guess whether it replicated or not before they tell you. I got 20/28. Some of them were obvious (#3 - no, using a bad font does not make people answer questions more carefully; #22 - yes, people attribute more responsibility to adults than to babies). But there were some big surprises for me: #6 - Participants read a hypothetical wa…
Replication Failures
- Disgust sensitivity predicts homophobia (no it doesn’t)
- Assimilation and contrast - the order of asking specific vs. general questions about the same domain matters (no it doesn’t)
- Priming Consumerism - being told you’re acting as a consumer reduces your trust in others (no it doesn’t)
- Moral Cleansing - people exposed to unethical things have an urge to cleanse themselves physically (no they don't)
- Priming Warmth - on warm days people have higher belief in global warming (no they don’t)
- Structure & Goal Pursuit - being exposed to structure improves goal pursuit (no it doesn't)
- Incidental Disfluency - making tasks incidentally difficult (hard to read fonts) - improves analytic performance (no it doesn’t)