Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Statistical Tool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Statistical Tool. Show all posts

Saturday, November 9, 2013

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.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Fraud-Detection Tool Could Shake Up Psychology

By Martin Enserink
ScienceInsider
Originally published July 3, 2012

The most startling thing about the latest scandal to hit social psychology isn’t the alleged violation of scientific ethics itself, scientists say, or the fact that it happened in the Netherlands, the home of fallen research star and serial fraudster Diederik Stapel, whose case shook the field to its core less than a year ago. Instead, what fascinates them most is how the new case, which led to the resignation of psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam and the requested retraction of two of his papers by his school, came to light: through an unpublished statistical method to detect data fraud.

The technique was developed by Uri Simonsohn, a social psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who tells Science that he has also notified a U.S. university of a psychology paper his method flagged.

That paper’s main author, too, has been investigated and has resigned, he says. As Science went to press, Simonsohn said he planned to reveal details about his method, and both cases, as early as this week.

If it proves valid, Simonsohn’s technique might find other possible cases of misconduct lurking in the vast body of scientific literature. “There’s a lot of interest in this,” says Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who recently launched an examination of replicability in social psychology findings.


There are other stories about Diederik Stapel on this site.