Via her reader, Seelye, UD learns of the latest iteration of way-bogus psychology scholarship.
She’s named Francesca Giro and she has a really cool website.
We’re all looking for easy steps to a better brighter you, and Happiness + Efficiency experts oblige us with studies showing that, like, thinking of eating meat makes you more boorish and less social. (I read this particular result, from world-famous Diederik Stapel, to Mr UD, who laughed merrily.) H+E experts (Dan Ariely – a co-author of Francesca Giro’s! – Marc Hauser – who shares with Giro the Harvard affiliation – Jens Förster, etc.) are always flooring us with amazing whodathunkits, and we fall for this shit every single time cuz it comes out of Harvard or cuz we just want to believe it or because we’re thrilled by the weird.
But Uri Simonsohn (a name known to readers of this blog) doesn’t fall for it. At all. He finds discipline-destroying lies enraging, and sets about, with a couple of colleagues, to keep the field reasonably clean through exposure of research fraud. The miscreants make stuff up and manipulate numbers in order to keep generating attention-grabbing amazements and giving amazing TED talks re: the amazements and Uri’s right behind them, running the numbers.
How can we protect ourselves from marauding high-profile psych frauds?
Step One: If something sounds bogus, it’s probably bogus.
June 25th, 2023 at 9:51AM
Step Zero: Conduct your research as if everyone is watching. It was easy enough, years ago, to treat computer output as good enough (report the estimates and standard errors from a non-converged run of the statistical software, in econ) if the outcome seemed plausible enough to survive review. Lead us not into temptation.
Why somebody with honorable Harvard gig obsesses over getting more Minimal Publishable Units out and compromises her integrity I’ll never understand.
June 25th, 2023 at 11:15AM
Stephen: Couple of possibilities:
1. She never had any integrity to compromise. As in the great song How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?
2. As in the great porn film, Never Enough.