{"id":69805,"date":"2012-05-16T21:46:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T05:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=16703"},"modified":"2012-05-16T21:46:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T05:46:10","slug":"bias-in-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/05\/16\/bias-in-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"Bias in psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/notrocketscience\/2012\/05\/16\/my-new-story-on-psychology%E2%80%99s-problem-with-replications\/\">Ed Yong<\/a> has a piece in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/replication-studies-bad-copy-1.10634\">Nature<\/a> on the problems of confirmation bias and replication in psychology. Yong notes that &#8220;It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results.&#8221; The way this has been explained to me is that you perform an experiment, get a p-value of &gt; 0.05 (significance). You <em>know<\/em> that your hunch is warranted, so just modulate the experiment, and hope that the p-value comes in at &lt; 0.05, and you have publishable results! Obviously this is not just a problem in psychology; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plosmedicine.org\/article\/info%3Adoi\/10.1371\/journal.pmed.0020124\">John Ioannidis<\/a> has famously focused on medicine. But here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/20383332?dopt=Abstract&amp;holding=npg\">chart<\/a> which shows that positive results are particular prevalent in psychology:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/05\/pone.0010068.g001.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-16704\" title=\"pone.0010068.g001\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/05\/pone.0010068.g001.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"447\" height=\"515\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are many angles to this story, but one which Ed did not touch upon is the political homogeneity of of psychology as a discipline. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2007\/07\/is-the-academy-liberal\/\">The vast majority<\/a> of psychologists are political liberals. This issue of false positive results being ubiquitous is pretty well known within psychology, so I&#8217;m sure that that&#8217;s one reason <a href=\"http:\/\/people.virginia.edu\/~jdh6n\/\">Jonathan Haidt<\/a> has emphasized the ideological blinders of scholars so much. Let&#8217;s assume that the &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/4I13cWyqivA\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ed Yong has a piece in Nature on the problems of confirmation bias and replication in psychology. Yong notes that &#8220;It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results.&amp;#822&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69805"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70069,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69805\/revisions\/70069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}