Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#2[deleted]
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#3>... Participants (n=60) were randomly...
Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously?
This study is utter bullshit.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#4Wonderful. You just know that some wag will jump on this and twist this into "It is intelligent to be racist!".
Personally, I find the idea of wiring my brain, my self, up to something which zaps it with little to no understanding of the underlying science or function scares the bejesus out of me, and strikes me as a strange at best and stupid at worst thing to do.
Ah, let me just pop a leech on this, it'll get my phlegmatic humour rebalanced.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#5>... Participants (n=60) were randomly... Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously? This study is utter bullshit.
Perhaps the sample size isn't as large as you'd prefer, but the use of causal language is appropriate here. Indeed, the authors applied a causal intervention (tDCS or a sham treatment) to randomly assigned subjects. This type of study design is pretty much the classical way to infer a causal relationship.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#6>... Participants (n=60) were randomly... Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously? This study is utter bullshit.
Did you read the paper? I don't see how you could walk away with the impression that this is "just correlation", let alone bullshit. Moreover, your quip about n=60 strikes me as the kind of comment made by people who don't know how research and statistics work.
n=60 is actually pretty big for this kind of study (most cognitive studies involving fMRI, for instance, hover around n=20). Either way, simply looking at the sample size is deceiving, as statistical power is what matters in the end. If sufficient power can be achieved with 60 persons, then yours is not a valid criticism.
Concerning the design, this is a straight-up experimental manipulation and not just a correlative study. There were two groups, one which received real tDCS and the other which received a sham tDCS. Subjects were assigned to each group in a double-blind fashion, and the measure of interest here is the improvement between the first test (pre manipulation) and the second test (post manipulation). The use of a sham rules out any placebo/nocebo effects.
This is exactly the kind of study that one would design in order to test causality. We have both temporal precedence and covariance; together, these strongly suggest that tDCS is responsible for the observed effects.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#7>... Participants (n=60) were randomly... Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously? This study is utter bullshit.
Did you read the paper? I don't see how you could walk away with the impression that this is "just correlation", let alone bullshit. Moreover, your quip about n=60 strikes me as the kind of comment made by people who don't know how research and statistics work. n=60 is actually pretty big for this kind of study (most cognitive studies involving fMRI, for instance, hover around n=20). Either way, simply looking at the…
http://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/04/correlation-even-imply-co...
A correlation in your sample (especially at that size) does not imply a correlation in the population, even if you validate it with additional sham tests.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#8>... Participants (n=60) were randomly... Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously? This study is utter bullshit.
It's getting really annoying how many self-annoited gods of statistics keep creeping up online.
60 is plenty if the effect is large enough. Hey, even n=4 can make for a good study. Give two of them cyanide and two of them a placebo, let all the trial-size-too-small-correlation-isnt-causation-people watch and then ask them to back up their criticism with a nice helping of the tested substance.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#9Wonderful. You just know that some wag will jump on this and twist this into "It is intelligent to be racist!". Personally, I find the idea of wiring my brain, my self , up to something which zaps it with little to no understanding of the underlying science or function scares the bejesus out of me, and strikes me as a strange at best and stupid at worst thing to do. Ah, let me just pop a leech on this, it'll get my p…
It has nothing to do with intelligence, it is just all about being realist. Existence of different races comes from the fact that there are genetic differences between people. It would be stupid to assume that those genetic differences have no other effect than skin color.
Re: Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice
#10>... Participants (n=60) were randomly... Beside from that, the title suggests something like a causal connection when they just found it correlating on a sample of 60 persons? Seriously? This study is utter bullshit.
It's getting really annoying how many self-annoited gods of statistics keep creeping up online. 60 is plenty if the effect is large enough. Hey, even n=4 can make for a good study. Give two of them cyanide and two of them a placebo, let all the trial-size-too-small-correlation-isnt-causation-people watch and then ask them to back up their criticism with a nice helping of the tested substance.
Exactly,
"... if the effect is large enough"