The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves?

By Jerry Adler
Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
Originally posted April 28, 2014

Here is two excerpts to a long, yet exceptional, article on research in the social sciences:

OUTRIGHT FAKERY IS CLEARLY more common in psychology and other sciences than we’d like to believe. But it may not be the biggest threat to their credibility. As the journalist Michael Kinsley once said of wrongdoing in Washington, so too in the lab: “The scandal is what’s legal.” The kind of manipulation that went into the “When I’m Sixty-Four” paper, for instance, is “nearly universally common,” Simonsohn says. It is called “p-hacking,” or, more colorfully, “torturing the data until it confesses.”

P is a central concept in statistics: It’s the mathematical factor that mediates between what happens in the laboratory and what happens in the real world. The most common form of statistical analysis proceeds by a kind of backwards logic: Technically, the researcher is trying to disprove the “null hypothesis,” the assumption that the condition under investigation actually makes no difference.

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WHILE IT IS POSSIBLE to detect suspicious patterns in scientific data from a distance, the surest way to find out whether a study’s findings are sound is to do the study all over again. The idea that experiments should be replicable, producing the same results when run under the same conditions, was identified as a defining feature of science by Roger Bacon back in the 13th century. But the replication of previously published results has rarely been a high priority for scientists, who tend to regard it as grunt work. Journal editors yawn at replications. Honors and advancement in science go to those who publish new, startling results, not to those who confirm—or disconfirm—old ones.

The entire article is here.

What Doctors Don't Know about the Drugs They Prescribe

The Menace Within: The Stanford Prison Experiment

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?

By Romesh ratnesar

It began with an ad in the classifieds.

Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks. More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford's Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard.

Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt "powerless."

The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting into.

Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study's participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.

The public's fascination with the SPE and its implications—the notion, as Zimbardo says, "that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation" —brought Zimbardo international renown. It also provoked criticism from other researchers, who questioned the ethics of subjecting student volunteers to such extreme emotional trauma. The study had been approved by Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee, and Zimbardo says that "neither they nor we could have imagined" that the guards would treat the prisoners so inhumanely.

In 1973, an investigation by the American Psychological Association concluded that the prison study had satisfied the profession's existing ethical standards. But in subsequent years, those guidelines were revised to prohibit human-subject simulations modeled on the SPE. "No behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America," Zimbardo says.

The Stanford Prison Experiment became the subject of numerous books and documentaries, a feature film and the name of at least one punk band. In the last decade, after the revelations of abuses committed by U.S. military and intelligence personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the SPE provided lessons in how good people placed in adverse conditions can act barbarically.

The experiment is still a source of controversy and contention—even among those who took part in it. Here, in their own words, some of the key players in the drama reflect on their roles and how those six days in August changed their lives.

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The entire article can be here.  The article brings up a host of ethical issues related to research.