I predict eric's response will be that people would not be so blase about data if they felt that psychology were not just a matter of opinion and experiments were not just a matter of showing off your ideas, as opposed to proving them. But we'll see.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2011 5:35 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 7:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[email protected]> wrote: Roger, You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base. Eric -- Well, admittedly, it's been a bad few weeks for psychology in the news, not the sort of run of luck one would want to generalize too far. But I don't see how having a theory helps if the practice doesn't involve sharing observations made under reproducible conditions so they can be independently verified. Forget the statistical faux pas, and look at the PLOS paper: 49 papers from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition published in the second half of 2004, "all corresponding authors had signed a statement that they would share their data for such verification purposes", the data was requested in the summer of 2005, and Responses to Data Requests Of the 49 corresponding authors, 21 (42.9%) had shared some data with Wicherts et al. Thirteen corresponding authors (26.5%) failed to respond to the request or any of the two reminders. Three corresponding authors (6.1%) refused to share data either because the data were lost or because they lacked time to retrieve the data and write a codebook. Twelve corresponding authors (24.5%) promised to share data at a later date, but have not done so in the past six years (we did not follow up on it). These authors commonly indicated that the data were not readily available or that they first needed to write a codebook. In more than half of the papers the supporting data effectively doesn't exist? And more than a quarter of the authors don't even feel obliged to make excuses? Is this the behavior of a community of researchers collectively seeking a consensus of reproducible observations? -- rec --
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