Psychologists have been using poor research methods for so long that we
think our current methods are valid. We have been wise enough to
detect these problems and often comment on them, and even study them,
but we don't change them because there is essentially no correction.
It's like the old quote about the weather: everybody talks about it
but no one does anything about it. A good example I use in stats classes
is reliability. Psychologists have actually made contributions to the
study of measurement because our measures are so unreliable. I wonder
how many studies will not replicate or have stable effect sizes if the
dependent measures only have reliabilities of .8?
If the dependent measures can't be improved, we still forge on using
them as if they were perfectly valid and reliable. Of course, one
consequence of this is a poor rate of replication.
Mike Williams
Drexel University
On 9/3/15 1:00 AM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) digest
wrote:
Subject: RE: NY Times Article on Reproducibility
From: "Mike Palij"<[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 08:54:34 -0400
X-Message-Number: 1
On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 08:02:05 -0700, Jim Clark wrote:
>Hi
>
>Piece in NY Times by psychologist defending the discipline.
>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html?emc=edit_th_20150901&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=26933398&_r=0
>
>Judging by comments, readers aren't buying the argument.
Maybe Scott Lilienfeld should write an Op-Ed piece because
of his background on reviewing psychology as a science vs
being a pseudoscience. He hasn't commented on the
reproducibility project but one imagines that he may have
some useful insights as well as explanations that go beyond
"this is just an example of the self-correcting nature of science".
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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