Trouble at the lab

The Economist

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

My Take - The combination of ideology, self promotion and government grant money has clearly made scientific integrity an oxymoron. This isn't new. Those of us who have been paying attention have known this has been going on for years. Take a look at the web site "Retraction Watch" if you have doubts. Eventually it will become so problematic it will become a public scandal.

Here is a comment from Junkscience.com - I cannot add much to this in depth article on the unreliable nature of research. However please pay attention to sections on powering studies, statistical significance and the sacred concept in science of replication of experimental studies and why so many “important” new studies are rife with error and can’t be replicated. Big problems with bad methods, tunnel vision, confirmation bias, chasing funding and irresponsible journal editors chasing the publication bias for new and important findings.