People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#131

Post by Timon3 » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

yencabulator wrote: post #78

Timon3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to discount the replication crisis, but I'd like to ask you the same question again: how, specifically, do you design any psychological study that you can't discard with "well, they could be faking it"?

Measure changes in something the test subject isn't expecting and wouldn't realize they need to fake? E.g. if you had to sit in the waiting room for 5 extra minutes, your test score changes like this. Measure differences below conscious control, like reaction speed to positive/negative/etc words after exposure to certain inputs.

> Measure changes in something the test subject isn't expecting and wouldn't realize they need to fake? E.g. if you had to sit in the waiting room for 5 extra minutes, your test score changes like this.

I can discard this by saying "well, the subject might behave subconsciously differently when they know they are in any experiment". How would you refute that?

> Measure differences below conscious control, like reaction speed to positive/negative/etc words after exposure to certain inputs.

What if there are phenomena that don't correlate with the differences you know to measure?

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#132

Post by Timon3 » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #107

Timon3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we just stop studying psychology completely?

> So we just stop studying psychology completely? That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of? I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"?

> That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of?

It's not the only one I can think of, but no other options have been presented to me. I have been asking for solutions, but nobody has provided any that can't be dismissed on the same grounds.

> I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"?

Where did I write anything close to that? I am not saying anything about drawing conclusions, I am literally asking: how would you design a test that measures the proposed problem? Why are you accusing me of advocating for "drawing the wrong conclusions"?

It's incredible how many people want to read my comments as advocating for something they are not. If you feel attacked because I'm asking how we could measure your idea, maybe I'm not the problem, but your idea is?

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#133

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

jbavari wrote: post #75

Interesting that the entire article had nothing to mention about the Reid technique [1]. The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false. In the book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson [2], they cover false confessions in depth with a few court cases, as well as police techniques to invoke cognitive dissonance in the accused. Callout to…

> The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false.

This is one reason among many why it is a serious question to ask whether a confession increases or actually rather decreases the likelihood that the culprit commited the crime.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#134

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #114

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Probably the dirtiest open secret of the US criminal justice system is that it is structurally incapable of giving a truly fair trial to the vast majority of the accused. The system would grind to a halt without the vast majority of cases ending in plea bargains, and we have pretty good reasons to suspect that common police interrogation tactics (often functionally indistinguishable from psychological abuse)…

There actually have been cases where public defenders have used this to organize and demand better treatment for themselves and the defendants. Where public defenders all convince their defendants not to plea, simultaneously, thereby forcing the court into a situation where they cannot avoid violating the constitutional right to a reasonably speedy trial due to all of the cases. I wished more civil resistance like th…

I think a bigger issue in this case might be there public defenders are oversubscribed and sometimes not acting with all the vigor one might wish.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#135

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

Timon3 wrote: post #127

joebob42 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It being extremely difficult or impossible to design a convincing study doesn't make the other ones convincing.

I am not saying that any study is or is not convincing. I am literally just asking: how could you define a test for this? I am not stating that any individual study is good or bad or anything in between. I want to know: if I design a study, how do I design it in a way that makes it a good study in regards to this question?

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect for a person on in a sort of informal online conversation like this to be able to define a bulletproof experiment for the topic.

Let’s apply a similar logic to something that is clearly possible to design an experiment around. How about detecting neutrinos? If we were commenting on an article about detecting neutrinos by dropping a piece of paper and seeing if it bounced around a bit on the way down, I think we’d all identify that as not a very good experiment. But, I could not design a very good experiment for detecting neutrinos. And, this doesn’t say much about whether or not neutrinos exist, I’m just not a physicist.

So, if posed with that question, I would not have a good response. Despite this, I would still believe the dropped piece of paper experiment was not very good.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#136

Post by mbg721 » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #133

jbavari wrote: post #75

Interesting that the entire article had nothing to mention about the Reid technique [1]. The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false. In the book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson [2], they cover false confessions in depth with a few court cases, as well as police techniques to invoke cognitive dissonance in the accused. Callout to…

> The Reid technique has been used by law enforcement to convince criminals of confessions. Many confessions were found to be false. This is one reason among many why it is a serious question to ask whether a confession increases or actually rather decreases the likelihood that the culprit commited the crime.

That only matters if the truth is a major consideration. Some theories of justice don't care, as long as social order is maintained.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#137

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

dandanua wrote: post #105

ImHereToVote wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing it isn't used against the population at scale, huh.

Are you sure?

That is exactly what they were implying.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#138

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

Timon3 wrote: post #62

somenameforme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you could discard any study under that rationale among others. And the interesting thing is you'd likely be far more 'informed' for doing so. Social psychology has the lowest replication rate of any field. You're looking at top journals with replication rates in the twenties. [1] What this means is that if you were to take any give study in social psychology, and simply assume it was 'wrong' (either saying the o…

I don't want to discount the replication crisis, but I'd like to ask you the same question again: how, specifically, do you design any psychological study that you can't discard with "well, they could be faking it"?

It might not be possible with current knowledge, putting psychology outside the realm of the sciences.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#139

Post by Timon3 » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #135

Timon3 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying that any study is or is not convincing. I am literally just asking: how could you define a test for this? I am not stating that any individual study is good or bad or anything in between. I want to know: if I design a study, how do I design it in a way that makes it a good study in regards to this question?

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect for a person on in a sort of informal online conversation like this to be able to define a bulletproof experiment for the topic. Let’s apply a similar logic to something that is clearly possible to design an experiment around. How about detecting neutrinos? If we were commenting on an article about detecting neutrinos by dropping a piece of paper and seeing if it bounced aroun…

> I don’t think it is reasonable to expect for a person on in a sort of informal online conversation like this to be able to define a bulletproof experiment for the topic.

I am allowed to ask, right? It doesn't seem crazy to me that when someone criticizes a study, someone else will ask "how could you solve the problem you describe?". I would like to know if someone has any idea on how to falsify it, because if someone were to find one, it might convince me of the criticism.

> Let’s apply a similar logic to something that is clearly possible to design an experiment around. How about detecting neutrinos? If we were commenting on an article about detecting neutrinos by dropping a piece of paper and seeing if it bounced around a bit on the way down, I think we’d all identify that as not a very good experiment. But, I could not design a very good experiment for detecting neutrinos. And, this doesn’t say much about whether or not neutrinos exist, I’m just not a physicist.

I don't think that is a good comparison. A better one would be if there is an experiment, and then someone comments on the results by saying "well, it could have been dark matter particles interacting in some way". It might as well be true, but it's not definitive if they don't explain how to measure and isolate that. Someone else asking for how they would design the experiment to take this into account seems like a completely reasonable ask to me.

Re: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened (2015)

#140

Post by lelanthran » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

Timon3 wrote: post #132

lelanthran wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we just stop studying psychology completely? That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of? I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"?

> That's not the only option. Why is it the only one you can think of? It's not the only one I can think of, but no other options have been presented to me. I have been asking for solutions, but nobody has provided any that can't be dismissed on the same grounds. > I mean, where are you going with "Our only options are to draw the wrong conclusions, or to stop studying it altogether"? Where did I write anything close…

> It's not the only one I can think of, but no other options have been presented to me.

Well, then, with all due respect, if you already know of other options, why are you asking?

> I'm asking how we could measure your idea

Who cares? Even if you cannot "measure" (whatever that means) the alternatives, the fact still remains that people are drawing conclusions from incorrect and invalid data.

That's the point, really - the field of psychology is bereft of replicable studies.

Observing that the way a particular field performs research results in invalid conclusions doesn't put any obligation on the observer to provide alternatives.

It's enough to point out that a thing is wrong; there's no requirement to also provide the correct answer.