Psychologists Strike a Blow For Reproducibility 138
ananyo writes "Science has a much publicized reproducibility problem. Many experiments seem to be failing a key test of science — that they can be independently verified by another lab. But now 36 research groups have struck a blow for reproducibility, by successfully reproducing the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments in psychology. Even so, the Many Labs Replication Project found that the outcome of one experiment was only weakly supported and they could not replicate two of the experiments at all."
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Informative)
If the experiments are reproducible, it's science.
Apparently it's biochemistry that is not a science.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590 [wsj.com]
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Informative)
Psychology ran in a major hiccup, as many of it's experiments are no longer reproducible not because of bad 'science' but because they are considered naughty and not something that should really be done to people to test out psychological theories, as in http://www.bps.org.uk/what-we-do/ethics-standards/ethics-standards [bps.org.uk] (I used British standards rather than US ones, as the US ones have so badly been mauled by the US government and their fully medically and psychological researched mass torture facility at GITMO that the US ones are rules that 'should be' broken as defined by the US government) and http://mentalfloss.com/article/52787/10-famous-psychological-experiments-could-never-happen-today [mentalfloss.com].
Re:A quick question (Score:4, Informative)
Medication belongs to the field of psychiatry. And for the most part, they do have an effect. But it's only temporary, and the human body gets used to it after a while. So in the long term, medicine is largely useless, and in fact is counterproductive, as they tend to cause other, worse effects ("side" effects). But in the short term, it helps.
All systems have a state of equilibrium, a state of stability. The same holds for the body and the mind, two different but related and dependent systems. They'll always tend towards the state of equilibrium because that's the path of least resistance.
Psychological ills are not the equilibrium being tipped, but the point of equilibrium itself changing. To truly "cure" someone of depression or OCD or bipolar, you have to change the point of equilibrium itself. That's much, much harder than you can imagine, and a far greater challenge than any pill will ever resolve. Those whose equilibrium were changed by an event in their life are easier to change back than those who are born with a certain equilibrium. Some people call the former nature vs. nurture. I call it, again, the past of least resistance.
Psychology is not attempting to medicate everyone. It's attempting to explain in terms familiar to the scientific-minded humanity.
Re:Not bad at all (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read TFA? Or did you choose sentences to read randomly? Those we're quoted as the results that worked. In fact, here is the original paragraph:
Ten of the effects were consistently replicated across different samples. These included classic results from economics Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University in New Jersey, such as gain-versus-loss framing, in which people are more prepared to take risks to avoid losses, rather than make gains1; and anchoring, an effect in which the first piece of information a person receives can introduce bias to later decisions2. The team even showed that anchoring is substantially more powerful than Kahneman’s original study suggested.
Two that didn't were about social priming, one was currency priming, in which participants supported what I assume is the current state of capitalism after seeing money, and the other, priming feelings of patriotism with a flag. Moreover, both original authors we're positive about it:
Social psychologist Travis Carter of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who led the original flag-priming study, says that he is disappointed but trusts Nosek’s team wholeheartedly, although he wants to review their data before commenting further. Behavioural scientist Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who led the original currency-priming study, says, “We should use this lack of replication to update our beliefs about the reliability and generalizability of this effect”, given the “vastly larger and more diverse sample” of the Many Labs project. Both researchers praised the initiative.
There you go, quoting the article directly since you can't be bothered to read it. It is true that they apparently chose what some consider to be important effects and the evidence against social priming is upsetting to some. Still, the fact that verification actually happened and people are happy about it shows science is alive and kicking.
Anyway, another cool thing about this study should be that it uses this thing, the open science framework [openscienceframework.org] which I haven't heard about until today, but seems pretty cool.