Trouble at the lab

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not

The Economist
Originally posted October 19, 2013

“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.

Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.

The entire article is here.

7 More Cancer Scientists Quit Texas Institute Over Grants

By The Associated Press
Originally published on October 13, 2012

At least seven more scientists have resigned in protest from Texas’ embattled $3 billion cancer-fighting program, claiming that the agency in charge of it is charting a “politically driven” path that puts commercial interests before science.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with the backing of Gov. Rick Perry and the cyclist Lance Armstrong, a cancer survivor, has awarded nearly $700 million in grants since 2009; only the National Institutes of Health offers a bigger pot of cancer-research money.

The entire story is here.

False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research

High-profile cases and modern technology are putting scientific deceit under the microscope

By Alok Jha

The Guardian

Originally published September 13, 2012

Dirk Smeesters had spent several years of his career as a social psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam studying how consumers behaved in different situations. Did colour have an effect on what they bought? How did death-related stories in the media affect how people picked products? And was it better to use supermodels in cosmetics adverts than average-looking women?

The questions are certainly intriguing, but unfortunately for anyone wanting truthful answers, some of Smeesters' work turned out to be fraudulent. The psychologist, who admitted "massaging" the data in some of his papers, resigned from his position in June after being investigated by his university, which had been tipped off by Uri Simonsohn from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Simonsohn carried out an independent analysis of the data and was suspicious of how perfect many of Smeesters' results seemed when, statistically speaking, there should have been more variation in his measurements.

The case, which led to two scientific papers being retracted, came on the heels of an even bigger fraud, uncovered last year, perpetrated by the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. He was found to have fabricated data for years and published it in at least 30 peer-reviewed papers, including a report in the journal Science about how untidy environments may encourage discrimination.

The entire story is here.