How much Fraud is there in Psychology?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ค. 2024
- #fraud #science #philosophy
Recent years have seen a rise in discovered fraudulent scientific research. But how much of a problem is fraud really, and what can be done about it? Find out in this video!
If you want to read more about this topic, we recommend Stuart Ritchie's "Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth" - which you can get with our affiliate link to support us:
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[3] R. Craig, A. Cox, D. Tourish, and A. Thorpe, “Using retracted journal articles in psychology to understand research misconduct in the social sciences: What is to be done?,” Research Policy, vol. 49, no. 4, p. 103930, May 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2020.103930.
[4] D. Fanelli, “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data,” PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 5, p. 11, 2009.
[5] J. Stricker and A. Günther, “Scientific Misconduct in Psychology: A Systematic Review of Prevalence Estimates and New Empirical Data,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, vol. 227, no. 1, pp. 53-63, Jan. 2019, doi: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000356.
[6] A. Marcus and I. Oransky, “What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?,” The New York Times, May 23, 2015. Accessed: Dec. 07, 2021. [Online]. Available: www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/op...
[7] J. K. Tijdink, R. Verbeke, and Y. M. Smulders, “Publication Pressure and Scientific Misconduct in Medical Scientists,” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 64-71, Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1177/1556264614552421.
[8] S. Ritchie, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
[9] W. Stroebe, T. Postmes, and R. Spears, “Scientific Misconduct and the Myth of Self-Correction in Science,” Perspect Psychol Sci, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 670-688, Nov. 2012, doi: 10.1177/1745691612460687.
[10] U. Simonsohn, “Just Post It: The Lesson From Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone,” Psychol Sci, vol. 24, no. 10, pp. 1875-1888, Oct. 2013, doi: 10.1177/0956797613480366.
[11] J. M. Wicherts, “Psychology must learn a lesson from fraud case,” Nature, vol. 480, no. 7375, p. 7, Dec. 2011, doi: 10.1038/480007a.
[12] J. P. Simmons, L. D. Nelson, and U. Simonsohn, “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 11, pp. 1359-1366, Nov. 2011, doi: 10.1177/0956797611417632.
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If only there were a rigorous scientific field devoted to the study of human behavior, we might be able to rationally design a solution for this problem.
The fact that this isn't upvotes way more leads me to the conclusion that most of the TH-cam audience is too stupid to appreciate irony. I wonder if I can get sponsorship to study this "scientifically"? 🤔
@@squirlmycalm down Einstein the comment isn't even that smart and the reason it's not higher is simply because there's a few better ones
It's too complex so impossible. If only people could study complexity!
Well you see, problem solving is not only about rationality, it's also about emotionality and other psychological processes as well.
Also, "cheating" could also be considered a form of problem solving, although in this case not a very fruitful one.
@@squirlmy
Let's see, uses the phrase "Upvotes" and has a false sense of being smarter than people around him.
Certified Reddit moment.
Statistical fraud (in all fields) is a great example of why "trusting the experts" should be a rule of thumb and not a dogmatic order.
Not even that. Only give preliminary trust after knowing their financial connections
The difference between a field like psychology and one like synthetic chemistry is vast. Most top synthetic journals are replicated, not just by the journals, but by people using the techniques described for their own research
@@jacob9673 True enough. But the moment it involves human trials, the potential for fraud gets dang easy.
Exactly, whatever the field may be, it always involves humans, one way or the other.
This is why you should trust science 🧪 and not scientists 🧑🔬
You'd think psychologists would understand that people will cheat when there is motive and opportunity, but that would require introspection.
@@nobody7158 Sure, but only God knows who is a real Christian...
I mean there's also pressure to pump out the right amount of papers to keep your PhD, depending on a place where you are in.
@nobody7158 you haven't been to Philippines
@@niewazneniewazne1890 sounds like motive
This kind of makes me wonder about the DSM 5 and how much of the mess that turned out to be was the result of similar shenanigans. You've got conclusions in opposition to information from more reliable sources being ignored so that they could do things like writing autism diagnosis criteria with the intent to reduce the diagnoses given without sufficient evidence that there's enough over diagnosis to represent a problem. And confounding a failure to enjoy things with a failure to seek out enjoyable things, even though they're reliably known to be on separate circuits in the brain based on work done by neurologists.
The fact that academic fraud exists in the first place is a huge problem. Because even if the rate at which it happens is small, the consequences can cause a large-scale problem if undetected.
You cannot completely eliminate it. Because to devise a 'perfect' system requires a 1984 style control mechanism. Do you want that?A totalitarian system of control in academia?You're not gonna like it. Because once they eliminate the big problems they'll come for the small problems. Power breeds ambition for even more power. Be careful what you wish for. The desire for societal purity is the gateway to concentration camps.And you might find yourself there in a supreme irony. Once you tell the system to purify society it goes all in. Trust me I know what the system can do. Don't give it any ideas about purity.
Yep like if some kind of new food ingredient is determined to be safe because they set the p-value really high to the point where it would be really difficult to say that it will make you sick or cause health issues if consumed. Then manufacturers can use it in their products to save money and not get blamed if consumers develop health issues because the "research" showed it was safe for consumption, so something else must have made them sick, not their product.
@@kraziecatcladyA lot of research is done to claim something like that, so peer-reviewing will eliminate most of this hypothetical problem (as it already does). Of course companies can use anything, but it won't matter for the scientific community.
@@nikolas4347Yes, scientific community has gotten much better at detecting that kind of bs over the course of history.
you should check physics, it's not as bad as psychology but has more implications.
How is this kind of fraud _NOT_ a criminal offense when they were given money to do the research? It's literally a con-job to ask someone for money, then turn in a bogus product. It's a civil-offense at the very least by "breech-of-contract", but it's more likely an outright financial-scam -- which _IS_ a criminal offense.
Not to mention all of the social problems these causes as these results go on unchallenged in society.
@@loup9003 Exactly, the vaccine to autism development myth still persists in some circles of society to this very day as the result, even with the studies being blatantly, and correctly, they labeled as bunk The guy got his medical license revoked but there should've been a criminal charge as well.
I'm autistic so I do have a bias here in some regards.
It's like the judicial system is a mockery of the term
Because if they had to hold them accountable…your standards have to be applied across the board, which would see almost a blanket sanctioning of the sciences overall. The amount of data fraud and outright lying that happens in science because of financial incentive would destroy most people’s faith in institutions.
@@Blurredborderlines I read an article some time ago, that mentioned that the lab-mice that are always used that show that this or that product "caused-cancer-in-lab-mice" were all from the same basic lineage... and that the lineage in question is ... _prone-to-cancer._ In which case, nearly *everything* that has "been-shown-to-cause-cancer" ... it's just questionable. So much was built on that faulty foundation.
I see your point. But i think that ultimately a greatly reduced amount of 'science' is preferable to a huge pile of _BULLSHIT science._
This is the result of the "publish or perish" bullsheet going on in academia. Most of the "thousands of papers" published each year are worthless so this is how quantity over quality has become the norm. Unfortunately this is not limited to psychology.
This is really it. Academic littering.
Yep. This comment is too far down. It's a systemic issue caused by the incentive structure. If your job hinges on publishing as much as possible, and in order to do that you need to collect tonnes and tonnes of real world data, usually with relatively tiny amounts of money (academia basically lives off free and low wage labour of grad students), then you're more likely to cheat because the game feels (and is) rigged. I'm not excusing the behaviour, but there's a clear reason behind it. It's not just about fame and fortune, it's also about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
More than that, any sort of fame or recognition attracts fraud. For example, the man in the video chose to get published in a famous journal instead of a mid range journal.
I remember wanting to become a college level professor in highschool to teach some form of biology until my mother told me about publish or perish. And that the only people who just do teaching at that level are at community colleges and they get treated like shit. So I went into healthcare instead. Screw publish or perish. I just wanted to teach high level science. I don't give a hot wet shit about research.
Not quite. This is a big component, but far from being the only incentive for fraud. Saying that publish or perish is THE culprit is apologetic tonfraudsters. It gives them a clear path to say that "the end justifies the means".
Came here for Freud, stayed for fraud
😂
Yes, I misread the title too haha
Good one
they will be always together
If by "fraud", you mean "invent the data" then i agree with your assessment. If, however, you mean "manipulate the study to provide a foregone conclusion", then i fear the number will rise to over 50%.
That's closer to like 80%
"science" is like a corrupt religion, a cult.
Agreed. They could even do it unintentionally. They’re probably convinced they’re right and they are just trying to protect the truth from lying data.
I actually did this in my final year of high-school and I received the highest mark in my class and got a special mention from the teacher. I was a good science student, one of the best in the country, but I completely fabricated the results of one of my tests. Probably why I'm an artist and designer these days, because I'm better at creating nonsense than collecting evidence
for those interested the objective of the experiment was to determine whether different colors of light carry different amounts of energy. I did an experiment with a partner using lasers, but I was unsatisfied with the experiment and researched the original experiment, by some female scientist whose name I believe was Antoinette, and discovered that it involved breaking sunlight with a prism, not using lasers, and the point of the experiment was to detect infrared light, not to measure the energy of colors. Instead of recreating the experiment I just photoshopped some images from the internet to make it look like I did it, including changing inches on rulers to cm in photoshop. My extra research got me my high mark, as well as the fact that my female teacher loved that I credited a female scientist.
Photoshop makes everything possible 😂😂
@@TommyLikeTompolitics staining science its something people don't talk alot
@danielayaquica7120 Fr though. Its been bad for a while and its getting worse
Your story sounds like a lie too
You can't get away with just blaming it on the fraudsters. Like a bank that leaves the vault door open, the bank is really the culprit. For academia you buy these papers on the understanding that they have been checked. If a bunch of students can detect this fraud then professional peer review is also the problem where you give your stamp of approval to things you have not run basic statistical analysis on.
Peer review is mostly done without any pay
@@dpt4458where would the money come from in order to make this change? Peer review should be compensated in some way.
Are you just trolling? If you walk into an open bank vault, you will still be charged for robbery. Stakeholders could sue the bank for negligence, but it's still the responsibility of the one who takes the money. Even if the bank makes it easy, it's still stealing. So what's your point you're trying to make? Negligence of testing studies is a separate problem, but that doesn't mean they're somehow responsible for the fraud. That still requires prosecution of fraudster, not blaming the entire peer review process.
I guess 65+ upvoters are trying to agree the universities should take more responsibility. But the example you start with is so completely screwy. Do you have ANY idea what universities should do to address the problem? I'm listening! Just stealing from an open bank vault is such a useless example. And if a sufficient number of academic fraudsters are fired, sued, and otherwise persecuted; then that really is addressing the perverse incentives. Without saying EXACTLY what else should be done, is just pointing fingers, shifting blame. I agree they should probably do more, but the bank metaphor totally breaks down to be worse than useless, even hysterical. What's the equivalent of a "bank vault" here?
@@squirlmy Simple: poor checking is temptation to the fraudster. Like the bank waving all that gold in front of the thief's face.
The interesting approach to the motivating factors of fraud is to consider the sources of funding. For example, if a scientist creates a fraudulently study or falsifies results, then obviously they have a reason to support the conclusions of those results. If funding is attracted to studies that support the views or interests of the founders or donors, then it is a motivation for scientists to not only commit outright fraud but also to design studies in a way that would essentially produce the results desired by the funders.
Bingo! It's support of the narrative which is that White males are bad, everyone else is good.
This is actually where a lot of the freud comes from. The scientist may even justify it because they need money for another project they want to work on.
Yeah this is a problem plaguing all scientific fields including natural sciences
It’s so crazy that 50% of core psychology papers can’t be replicated.
source?
@@Makima111 can't site on youtube, but there was a major replication paper attempting to replicate the most cited psychology papers, aka the seminal papers, and found that 50% failed to reproduce significant results.
@@Makima111 You must be new, because its more actually, it's 2/3rds
Once you understand more about the tools psychology has available to measure many of its research questions, 50% doesn't seem too surprising. It's so easy to end up with studies that have measurement problems and many people don't spend the time thinking carefully about the potential problems. You have to understand a lot about how statistics works and how your measurement tools were created and studied to have a reasonable degree of confidence in their results. A lot of that 50% poor replication is probably not fraud: it's just using measures that won't give you results with strong reliability and validity across contexts.
1. It is not just psychologists
2. One could argue fraud is much broader. It encompasses repeatability which is the core of science. Lack of repeatability can be as high as 60-90% of papers, despite the statistics and methodologies designed for only p
estimated by yourself?
I'm afraid the accepted confidence interval in psychology is 5% (2 sigma), not 0.05%. So even if you use real data, if you repeat your experiment a couple of times you will very likely "prove" your hypothesis. In physics the accepted confidence interval is 6 sigma,
@@move2003ny en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
@@ronald3836 yeah oops typo I should have removed that % symbol. 0.05 or 5%
@@RobespierreThePoof ah you must be an academic that loves to dissect words while not doing much research, especially not addressing the core problem, the elephant in the room
Francesca Gino, a prominent professor at Harvard Business School known for researching dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been accused of submitting work that contained falsified results.
Ironically enough.
From what I've seen the quality of psychological research is generally poor even when there is no intention of fraud.
There is a great deal of incompetence in this field.
In fact problem is much bigger than just fraud, that's true not only for psychology, but also with other science fields. There is so much papers that you need to somehow make one that will get many citations, so you get some respect. On the other side it's hard to find something unexplored you can just write paper about with right methodology, so it's both interesting and truthful. And for journals there is so much papers offered that reviewers choose most interesting ones. So you for example can just find some small correlation on relatively small sample and point out controversial conclusion that will be interesting and looks okay for reviewers, but in fact there is no real breakthrough and application of paper result. I'm not scientist myself, but I saw explanation of the problem from other channels, so my wording may not be accurate, but I tried to explain the problem as I could
I took and advanced math class and the guy teaching it suggested the same, you're probably not going to discover something exciting and new in math, if you do you're probably one of the greatest geniuses of the age. He said you basically take someone's proof and basically do it for n = 2 type stuff.
The two problems which every psychology professor I’ve had has discussed: failure to replicate results, and publication bias. People are actively encouraged to submit faulty research because it’s necessary to get a job.
A further issue I’ve found is that psychology is the most insular to its own field when citing sources. Most sources you will find sourced in psychology papers are sourced from other psychological papers; this despite the heavy relations between psychology, economics, sociology, and biology.
This is a very important topic, particularly for the Humanities and Psychology. The failure to reproduce results seems to be significantly higher in this area of the sciences than in others to my knowledge. And little by little, this erodes the scientific enterprise.
It happens because people get into this field to lend whatever subjective ideas they already have some credence. Give it enough time, the ideas and ideologies that spring from academia become accepted parts of the culture. Then they become mandatory.
Maybe because it’s literally not a science lmao it’s very political and subjective*
Exactly. The lack of reproducible results is why universities need to steer clear of referring to the humanities as a science. I personally don't see it happening all the time, but the humanities have been referred to as a science by university websites, pamphlets, etc. enough times to make me take notice. There are a lot of social topics that are taught as irrefutable fact, when often times these topics are purely ideological depending upon culture, region, politics, etc.
Even false results in the natural sciences are prone to being taken as true for a variety of reasons. Research and study is something that shouldn't be rushed.
@@AleXander9KPSN what you've alluded to as 'political' and 'subjective' is precisely what the social sciences deal with. Are we now going to disqualify social sciences as a whole? And on what grounds are you challenging the merit of the humanities and psychology?
@alxkrvtzv There's a difference between not being a science and not having merit. You seen to link the two.
Some social studies degrees are heavily politicised. Sociology is commonly infiltrated my Marxists.
in 5th grade they had us survey people for eye color. i just wrote down the highest number for brown, followed by blue, green and hazel. the teacher said i did great work. so they taught me it's easier to just tell 'em what they expect than actually research. i wouldn't do this now, but it still makes me think
With how complex the systems these fields purport to study are, none of this should be surprising. Very often there are simply too many variables to control in order to achieve a meaningfully generalizable result.
Having a degree in Psychology did not make me an expert in human behavior, although it helped. After graduating, I was introduced to Re-evaluation Counseling, or co-counseling, which involves helping each other to "discharge" unreleased emotions, leading to additional insights into each traumatic experience, hence the name "re-evaluation." It's goal is not to publish papers at a university, but rather to effect positive change in the individual. The goal being to allow each person to creatively respond to new challenges in the moment, and not replay some tape of how they insufficiently responded to something similar in the past.
Not covered in this video, is the problem with university culture. Professors are expected to publish new material, or perish. This creates an incentive in the more intellectually challenged members of their staff, to commit fraud.
And that brings me to the title of this video: "is there fraud in psychology?" Which could easily be misinterpreted by a casual glance to imply that all psychology is fraudulent. In a world where too many people already think ill of the subject, (all the while subconsciously practicing simple psychology in their day-to-day lives), any suggestion that re-enforces this idea, is counterproductive. Primarily, because too many people think that adulthood equates to maturity, which is false. Phobias abound, and psychology is supposed to be helping us get rid of them. But if psychology has a bad name, (perhaps brought on by phobias not wanting to be cured), we're going to have a hard time making this world a better, healthier, more mature, place.
True, the academic landscape for all professions and disciplines is a wasteland, professors are force to publish articles at a rate that values quantity over quality research.
Isn’t it odd that since the advent of Psychology 120 years ago. That that was when people really started going crazy. Now psychology has been “de-stigmatized”. And our mental health crisis is worst than ever in history.
@@RedShnow hush. take your pills citizen.
@@RedShnow Yeah because in the past people were not crazy at all and mental disorders didn't exist back then.
Your statement is really fallacious, just because psychology allows us to categorize and define mental disorders or "crazyness" it doesn't mean psychology created such disorders, we just simply became more aware of them. Even in philosophy way before the advent of psychology people still had questions about the nature of human behaviour, it was actually in the modern era and the rise of globalization, liberalism and capitalism that classifications for the "abnormal" starred to appear, if anything people started going "crazy" thanks to medicine, psychology just followed the same road
@@GiegueX The point was to highlight the fact that psychology/psychotherapy is supposed to Help people where as today. The world is overflowing with those two things. And there's grown men with beards rolling around on the floor like newborns. Men taking each other out for a walk to poop on a leash. Men dancing for children wearing adult performance costumes. Transexual mental health crisis occurring in the world. Highest suicide rate/addiction rate/mental illness prevalence ever in history of our country. Homosexual perversion being raised to the standard of good behavior instead of sin and deviant crime. It's not a formal argument. So it's not a fallacy. It's just obviously ironic that now we have "advanced" so far in the study of "psychology", people are literally undeniably going nuts.
I work in academia and fraud seems to show up in so many tiny places - or big places, like behind-everyones-back deals between professors and deans against other professors for example. When it comes to scientific data, there are also financial structures in place that ensure the occurence of fraud: many project funds have such extremely specific catchwords they look for (and discard proposals that don't use all of them) that researchers are regularly coerced to massage their data so it marginally fits the (often narrow or senseless) criteria.
It is in such a broken state that I often lose pride in working in a field that works this way.
Curious how his fraud has a clear ideological bent to it.
Was his fraud intended to further his career, or push an agenda?
Nobody can really look into Stapel's mind but it seems like he is a 'true believer' of whatever confirmation or refutation he attached to his hypothesis, even if he knew he made them up wholecloth. But it also seems he had a knack for knowing what 'sells well', what gets colleagues talking about him, what will get him grant money. So without much evidence about motivations I think he was good at following the 'buzz' and with his career growing his ego did too so he wanted to his results to follow what is to him 'obviously the way the world works'. I don't think there was some other organisation bankrolling him for their agenda, but just stuff mr Stapel thinks 'must be true' became his agenda and he'd find grants that would fit the narrative in his mind.
I would suggest both. Choose more conservative looking white people, men of his own age if he could find them. Clear case of researcher bias.
These studies are big red flags from the git-go: "white people are bad" "Capitalism is bad" methinks you're playing dumb.
It can also be a camouflaging tactic. If the results are in line with what the peer reviewers expect to happen based on their own ideologies, then they're less likely to question the validity of the experiment.
Could you be more clear what you think the bias is? Anti-dentist? Isn't it that big corporations just have to ask their customers to be honest and they will? Do you think that's leftist in some way? I think this purely his own selfish benefit, and any ideological bent is purely calculated to maximize sponsorship. There's no other ideology, there's no incentive for a bent that's not calculated for profit. But you're going to imagine one because it fits your own bias.
This happens in all academic fields.
true, but it seems especially common in social sciences, where high p-values can be disregarded as noise inherent to dealing with humans (which is true, yet still becomes a nice way to defend poor research).
Particularly pervasive in psychology due to their lackluster quantitative aptitude despite a heavy reliance on data in their studies.
Yeah but psychology is specially a joke
…within the sciences.
@wyltedleaves lol, this is so dishonest to compare physics to psychology in terms of research.
I was surprised to learn the admission rate was only 2%, but that virtually everyone had a fraud incident to their name. I think you accurately identified a prestige force in academia that produces deliberate falsifications of data and everyone knows it and tries to keep it quiet. I also thought it was interesting how many of the bad data practices you highlight don't necessarily belong to psychology, but are the kind of mistakes you might find in any science. I saw a lot of that prestige force in academia, where everyone is so focused on production that no one is really reading their peers work for the balance of ideas, and everyone is responsible for generating their own credential power, so questions of informal merit come across like personal attacks. In public-school-universities, the "peers" who read it tend to be trained to look only for formal mistakes, and the process is actually quite sleek and refined. Anyways, I think the owl captured it all in very effective examples and a strong metaphor, providing some good resources along the way.
Imagine if big corporations started exploiting fraudulent studies.
Imagine the impossible.
"Started" ?
They have been doing that for more than a hundred years. Best example are all the fraudulent climate change denial papers they themselves financed
You mean like vaccine studies that prove they are safe and effective. LOL
This is a fantastic example of why authority can be so dangerous and destructive. How do you know anything, how can you know anything, and how can anyone else?
You don't. You have faith.
Faith: Believing in something without proof.
When faith and truth are on the same side. Faith leads to salvation.
When faith and truth are on the opposite sides, faith leads to destruction.
But since is faith, you do not know which one you are getting. And thus one should strive for the truth, not faith.
No this is about expertise. Authority and expertise are 2 different things. Authority is power without needing expertise.
@@RicardoSantos-oz3ujterrible answer. We know because we observe. The scientific method works, people are just forced to hustle so much theyre getting sloppy.
Experts are often wrong. The most dangerous person is often an expert with power. Authority often creates illusions of truth to support itself which end up being destructive. IMO, it seems like either way the best mindset is to know you know nothing. I don't know if God exists, and I don't know if my opinion is true. But so long as I remain impartial, and true to the data I have, I will sharpen the clarity of the images of reality I create in my mind.@@rickwrites2612
@@RicardoSantos-oz3ujYou can believe something to be 'true' when you can act based on that information.
idea: take a random sample of recent highly cited psychology papers, and investigate each one _extremely_ thoroughly. (do the same without the highly cited bias too for extra credits)
The results should be very enlightening.
What abut reproducibility problem? I remember couple years ago there was a big fuss about only around 3rd of studies being reproducible in psychology and social studies. I wonder could that be a sign that fraud is way more prevalent.
There is a lot of Freud in psychology.
In Medicine there's an "inside joke" that goes "People go into the field of Medicine that they themselves need the most". Admittedly that's pretty much tongue-in-check aimed directly at Psychiatry, but it makes you wonder.
As to the why of committing fraud in psychology, the last reason you mentionned is in my opinion a gret one.
As a student in psychology, I see first hand how much passion and zeal there is in the field when it comes to the implications of the research's results on our understanding of the human being.
Why ? I think because of the political implications, and the implications on each person's set of beliefs on the human race. The human race is at the center of our thought and our beliefs, it's hard to accept being wrong
This
It is difficult not to see a connection between the class structure/economics of academia and the questions it asks and funds. There is an area of critique growing around the profession of clinical psychology which discusses the way psych practice represses dissent, steers patients away from systemic or collective solutions towards individualism, moralism, and self help. Why are there academic stars at all? Why is knowledge framed as a competitive endeavour? Why is the social power of a university defined almost entirely by its endowment? Why does the salary and benfit structure of universities precisely mirror corporate capital? Why do "top talent" have second homes while adjuncts doing the work live in cars? Why are there "economics" departments, when their work with few exceptions is simply a sloppy reactionary melange of other fields, the essence of situational/opportunisitc as opposed to empirical or legitimate theoretical reasoning? Why is every large university a class replication factory rather than an engine of "uplift"? Psychology, like all disciplines, pretends to be separate from its context. It is not.
This is why I have more respect for jerks like Francis Galton. The guy was a eugenicist, did a study on father's vs son's heights, found that tall dads tended to produce sons closer to the average height, didn't like that result but rather than deny it he just gave it a disparaging name; Regression to the Mean.
The name is very theoretical
That doesn't even make sense. Why would tall dads produce sons close to average height instead of above the average height?
It only means they will be shorter then father not that they will be average height. So 210cm father will more often then not shorter sons, but sons height will be around 200-205cm. Mick Schumaher is also good example of that. His father was 7 times formula one champion he is barely good to be on track. Despite of that being bad F1 driver means you are at least in top 50 drivers in the world@@salj.5459
Because of two reasons:
genetics equalises height between parents, so tall father's will have average children with shorter wife.
And large height can be encoded in a regressive gene, meaning it expresses itself occasionally in a generation.
@@salj.5459also this is just anecdotal evidence but I've seen many short women with tall men and taller women with men of average height. Many short women might subconsciously look for men that can raise their children's heights so that's another possibility 🤔
Great video, this deserves a lot more views. Unfortunately, corrections get less views than misinformation.
We need to investigate climate change research because most of it is fraud. They are just trying to push an agenda on the public and the world.
And THAT'S why fraud happens. They already know this.
Most extreme case...a year ago.
Data management would probably go a long way to controlling this type of fraud. Instead of researchers keeping data in local files, servers managed outside the lab should be used that tracks who enters, modifies, or publishes data.
Statistics is lying with numbers.
Big data science is lying with big numbers.
The data sets are being fucked. AI is being trained on it. 😊
But then the fraudster would just manipulate the data before inputting it into the server. You'd still need a system in place to secure the pipeline from experiment to protected server. But yes, it's wild that research is kept on local systems
When I was in school I got super interested in data and statistics. I started to review the data used in these studies and I know there are a lot of people that study the mathematical methods, most of which are beyond my math skills. Then I started to get curious about any methodologies behind the collection since social science data is usually collected from direct observation or self evaluations (surveys). I found that there are not as many studies (that I could find) around collection methodologies for large self evaluation surveys or direct observation. That can mean unless the collection method itself has been peer reviewed, it could be unintentionally skewing the results.
...or intentionally skewed?
On problem is that much of the work entire field of scientific psychology would be invalidated. I took "Statistics for Psychology", as the field literally accepts much greater room for error in results, because of that problem. You say you became interested in the field, but if you didn't look into how psychology does it differently... I'm tempted to believe your own "research" was limited to a few Google queries. I bet you didn't think any of us would question that, did you? You can't have looked far, if the main problem you found was methodology of self-reporting, and didn't notice the entire feild accepts a different level of robustness altogether, from any other scientific field. Nice insight by itself, it's a good "cocktail party" observation. But the whole field operates on more questionable methodologies than just that, which is probably why the field invites more fraud.
@@squirlmy If every "scientific" paper in psychology published the last 50 years were never published, who would notice? Now replace "psychology" with "medicine" or "material sciences" or "physics" and repeat that question!
There are no social sciences, just social studies.
Oh man it’s a good thing this only happens in psychology and not in medicine or engineering or economics or any other department, right? Right guys?
Yeah, "right".
Thank you. I've been waiting for a continuation of this topic.
Am I the onlyone who read the title as "How much Freud is there in psychology?"? 😂
Considering Freud lied about every single one of his "successes" and invented entire cases whole cloth?
How much Freud is there in psychology? Just the tip.
I thought the title was "How much Freud is there in Psychology?" and the video would be about Freud's shaping of modern psychology and how much of his original theories were still present or modified in modern practice.
This is still great, though!
Or maybe a video titled was Freud just another fraud?
Modern science of any field stands on the shoulders of giants, an unbelievable amount of which are falsified or misleading. It's incredible how much "fact" we know today will be quietly rewritten in the next 100 years. Imo the best science comes from industry, not university
I believe it would already change a lot to enforce that every coauthor has to oversee the study - or more precisely to let them sign a document that they did oversee the study.
If fraud is detected, all authors need to be made responsible and in terms, there is a higher incentive to actually look what happens. And the more people are involved, the harder it is to go undetected.
Interesting. What would you say about interdisciplinary collaboration? There is a lot of joint work between philosophers and psychologists at the moment. I, as a philosopher, simply don't have the training to check what the colleague did with the data. Would that then still apply, or is the suggestion only for those who can do so?
I think that's a great idea. I remember the first thing I always do if I'm involved in any project whatsoever is digging into the data to make absolutely sure it's correct. And it's a pita. This idea would support this approach because now when a collaborator asks, they don't have to justify every time why they want the raw data, every detail etc.
Regarding what if a philosopher is coauthoring a paper, I'm afraid every researcher in any field is supposed to have a math/statistics background, otherwise you can't author a scientific paper.
If people want to take the benefits they should also take the downsides. If someone is not capable of checking work, should they be be regarded as having competence to oversee the work?
@@PhilosophicalQuestionswithout interdisciplinary review, everything will become siloed, and impossible to verify. It would also incentivize the usage of plain language instead of terms of art, which would make things more accessible to the public.
@@crabby7668 That used to be reasonable, but the standards these days in terms of what is often being studied times doesn't allow that. Back when the questions were simpler and could be answered with just tools from one discipline, that wasn't an issue. But, some studies take people from multiple different specialties because it's required to actually conduct the study, not because it's simply easier to do it.
If a person is corrupt or have been corrupted, a person will do fraud regardless of his academic background, political affiliations, civil status, demographic background, etc.
I red Stapel’s work published on Science about his experiment in the Utrecht station. Except for the fraud, I have to say it was a very well written paper ( I am keeping a copy for the style). However, the main problem in psychology, as also other researchers said, is the absence of theories or general scientific models that can act ad frame of references for the validation of studies. Therefore, psychology is a discipline full of very fragmented works whose interconnections are difficulty evaluable. But this is an old story (Wittgenstein: “For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. […] The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by”- Philosophical Investigations). The current academic system, which imposes results at any costs, cannot allow a good and well reasoned research.
I don't know where people get this "absence of theories or general scientific models" because one of the foundational courses in Psychology is *Theories of Personality* and that alone has tons of theories already and it also links to other scientific models.
Where I would start: Academia provides an app for collecting data. An experiment has at least two observers who independently record their observations using the app and when they finish, it signs the results with their certificate including time, and location making it immutable (good idea for a CS project here).
Two or three people could conspire to falsify their inputs but this scenario seems much less likely than someone later on playing with numbers in Excel and seeing what it does to the statistics.
In research, the hardest part is figuring out if you're asking the right question... focusing on a phenomenon. There is a reason why some observed phenomenon are called "presenting problem", which means there is an underlying cause.
I've seen different research projects that start the data analysis and realize there's something off. Since the project is more than half done, re-examening the base isn't an option. So the focus then is on the data. It then gets thin-sliced, certain variables left out as the team keeps trying different algorithms and operations until it "begins to make sense".
Finders will do better by having someone on staff who can lead a logic model discussion before money is granted.
This does make me nervous, since psychology is my major I hate to see the field I want to work be infested with frauds
Clearly this stunning and brave man needs our love and support, and action to reduce stigma of m&m addiction
Maybe I missed the part where you compared fraud in psychology with that in other fields. This comparison is not only nice to have but vital
Watch it to the end then
If you read the title of the video, you will notice it's about psychology, not science as a whole. So I don't know why you would expect that to be covered
Had this psychologist therapist. I swear she was sociopath she could care less of what was happening to you. Saw people as numbers to check off for her papers.
A lot of narcissists (whatever else they are) end up in positions where they can better enable themselves and other narcissists, be it the leading researcher on lies, researchers studying conditions caused by narcissistic abuse, economists saying capitalism is good, or politicians taking lobby dollars.
Well there’s a reason I take people that quote “scientific studies” with a grain of salt. Most people don’t have the wherewithal to realize that a study which backs up every bias they have may in fact be… biased. Also, most people don’t even read into studies, they just quote them ad nauseam. Those ideas, paired with the fact that even legitimate stats can be easily manipulated, make one realize the value in higher education rather quickly. It’s even sadder to realize that such higher education doesn’t always mean much.
This video was fantastic. Please continue putting out high quality and interesting videos.
Thank you!
As far as punishment goes, harsher punishments will lead to less fraudsters admitting fraud of their own volition.
The sad part is, it became part of the social norm to brand anybody with physiological acronyms freely.
huh?
When I wrote my Bachelors degree I had a thesis with a question I followed. The result was that it was just wrong and had no effect on anything. So the thing I found out is that I was wrong I guess. I got a passing grade. Just passing. Even though all the procedural stuff and all the methodologies were compleltely fine but I didn't find out anything.
I think one of the reasons why people commit fraud is because if you follow your thesis and it turns out there is nothing nobody is gonna care and give you just a passing grade or in the world of capitalism you will get no money.
4:43 There's also p value farming, manipulating control mechanism (or group), staging or fabricating results by using linguistics to generate desired outcomes, misrepresenting key aspects of a study by obfuscating data collection methodology or even intentionally omitting a control mechanism ( or group). I've been keeping a careful eye on academia for a while and the level of abject dishonesty I've been seeing take place over the last 20 years has been astonishing. Not simply in the scale of fraud but in the variety of different forms of deceit employed. The replication crisis is as it is purely because of the immense volume of fraud, the crisis is an issue of scale.
Thanks for making the video. What I do not understand is why data is not 'by default' a must for peer review. It does not need to be open, but it needs to be available on request.Did you ever explain the open data approach further?
Yeah don't know as well why it wasn't. The "data available upon request thing" is tricky, as a recent study found that it still doesn't come close to making the data easily accessible. We planned another episode on data collection, open science, and how scams actually get uncovered - but not sure when it will be ready
First time viewer here. What a wonderful channel you have. I love the vibe almost as much as the content. Well done.
thank you!
Psychology not deeply based on biology (molecular, cellular, systems neuroscience, physiology, behavioral ecology and evolution -external coherence ), good stats and inner coherence is doubtful.
I had a psychiatrist who did zero for me for a year except prescribe lithium. After a year with him, I realized I should have studied psychology in college because it's a place where you can FO and still have a successful, lucrative career.
Funnily enough, he would have actually studied medicine at university in most countries! :)
Psychiatrists are not psychologists - a psychiatrist still has to go through a medical residency. All this demonstrates is that you can have an MD and a bunch of medical knowledge and still be an idiot
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ there is no incentive for other psychologists to ferret out fraud
Hence why trusting experts blindly is one of the main fallacies people make (appeal to authority), and it's just as harmful as ignoring everything the experts say, overcorrecting for not listening to them blindly without doing research on them, making sure it's peer reviewed, etc
Do you have a link to the video about the forensic techniques when investigating data?
Who would have thought humans were the weakest link in science
I am currently writing my bachelors thesis on the topic and can highly recommend "Transparent and reproducible social science research. How to do open science" by Christensen et al. 2019. There are even more examples about fraud, explanations of replication issues and most importantly significantly more concrete solutions to academic fraud. Like pre-analysis plans, open data sharing and more. Its good. I can only recommend it.
I don't think that intensives tell the full story as to why people may lie in studies. While watching I could not help but think about the speedrunning community. You see people that cheat in all sorts of games, yet there is no real intensive to cheat. The only reward you get from getting a world record is personal satisfaction and some praise from the community. Yet, people still cheat anyway. I think the reason for why people tend to falsify data is because it is a temptation that is part of human nature. Whenever anybody does anything difficult, there is always the temptation or desire to make it easier. We experience this through work. We experience it in our day to day lives, and we see it with cheating/lying.
I think that one of the problems is that people are focused on finding new things, publishers also are more likely to publish article that proves something new, that something is real, and are less willing to publish article that say that something was not proven in course of experiment, that something was not found true etc.
Hey guys, great production, I love the owl, very cute. I appreciate that a lot of effort goes into creating this and its really amazing for the channel size - an idea I have is that some Broll eye candy would be great to diversify the whiteboard experience for the future. (But genuinely, I know how annoying editing and production can be when making these elaborately scripted videos that take a while to even write, so it's really only me being used to mass media)
As for my thoughts on the video, fraud in Academia is definitely a big problem. Statistical data fraud will always be a problem since its very hard to collect. Another issue is that it requires a lot of resources, while making it up literally allows you to pump out papers. Data Science has generally shown that you have an insane edge over other researchers if you're able to generate synthetic data (e. g. traffic simulations) so there's definitely a huge incentive to pad numbers and process data fraudulently.
As for solutions, I feel like open data sounds great until we take into the account that we live in the age of AI. I see that whenever a dataset is published for academic use in the AI field, even if its copyright protected, nothing is stopping companies to train their AI models on it, since it's literally untraceable if you train your model on a couple of datasets. And giving Facebook access to infinite psychology data is definitely a fast track to a dystopia.
I think statistics are very problematic in general, but it's the best we got. Perhaps making academic fraud a criminal offence might help. But in general, I think as long as "successful" research papers are treated better than "failure" ones (e. g. we collected the data and found no relationship) we will always have people try to cheat.
In my opinion, apart from sanctions, data should be more open, and data treatment and pluralism of perspectives should be an important portion of the discussion. It won't end fraud, but in combination it could decrease it. Contrary to doing an awful amount of work for getting some inane p-values, scientists should be encouraged to squeeze the most from the data, and if something interesting appears for some of the various possible perspectives, then ask what in the data and the stats that were used made it so. In some sense, I think studies passing to be more exploratory rather than confirmatory would be healthier.
Thank you for this video, this game me a lot of good info I can use to defend a criminal case that includes bad studies.
So long as journals only publish a majority positive results, and publication is tied to one's career outcomes as per University policy in an attempt to gain acclaim, this will be an issue. The current model will always encourage fraud and dishonesty.
I think they should publish more negative results. These can be very interesting, as well. I am sure a lot of people would be interested in the train station study even if it were not successful.
We never needed asylums more than we need them today. The problem is that all the "doctors" that would work there should all be patients.
I think implementing house arrest for medical treatment is a more urgent matter.
Mental institutions currently have to deal with patients, who are clearly able to function perfectly well in their own home 🏡 and only need to rest and calm down until they self heal, possibly with medication.
House arrest is needed as humans are very stubborn and they will try and go out or make their family go out, unless being told off constantly.
Its unfortunate because I feel like Ill be quoting studies in every day life, like these affect our worldview, our media, the decisions we, whether business, government or just personal make. Despite the Swiss cheese levels of experimental holes in the conclusions derived with the Stanford prison experiment it is still a part of our cultural and scientific zeitgeist.
Bravo for you exposing these lies. what practical result could studies like these resolve in the firsts place?
There is a lot of agenda bias in psychology to publish studies that push for... a certain type of narrative. And unfortunately this is all related to the "publish or perish" situation. Journals and magazines wish to push a certain narrative and will scrutinize more/less a study based on its conclusions. And if you scrutinize any study enough you can get it thrown out for the pettiest of reasons, or publish it with the most glaring flaws imaginable through explaining said errors as, for example, "error variables".
Or you could also manipulate the data analysis portion. One of the first things you learn in the most basic of data analysis courses, whether in psychology or any other scientific studies, is how easy it is to manipulate the data analysis portion of any study. It's almost unnerving
How much Freud is there in psychology? A lot, probably.
Thank you for this. As a data scientist, I respectfully disagree. Scientific misconduct happens due to lack of governance. The co-authors are indeed guilty of not doing due diligence (which grad students unrelated to the project did for them). 2 out of 100 people on the author lines are fraudsters on average. Don’t you think I screen the heck out of my co-authors before we embark upon a paper? Good governance and leadership would also solve the incentive problem. I just prefer my answer to yours because it empowers the individual scientist to play their part. 😊
"Data science" is run by left wing goons who fake data to try to disarm, dominate their enemies.
Making fraud a crime in research is quite dangerous. It´s a gateway to repress certain types of studies, which is already a challenge in academia, that scientist are somewhat held hostage to just get certain results. Paradigmas are probably the biggest problems in science nowadays and always were.
The system will always be tempted to directly control academic research.Once you give it the legal tools there is no stopping it. When it doesn't find 'criminals' it invents them by either changing definitions or 'planting' the evidence. I don't deny the existence of shady things in academia but giving the law too much power to police it is dangerous. North Korea is where you end up eventually. Historians are usually the first to sound the alarm because historically they're the first to feel the long arm of repression.Who controls the past controls the present. Every semicompetent historian knows exactly what policing academia means. Engineers can be policed but most of the time its the philosophers and historians who get imprisoned by the system once the system starts cracking down. Even North Korea wants its buildings and planes to mostly work and not collapse.
How exactly? If it says something like "You can't make up data you use" how could that be a gateway to misuse? Give a good enough legal definition of "fraud" and you're good. If you have a research that relies on anonymous unverifiable data, have it make a header "This paper is based on anonymous unverifiable data and should be viewed with a consideration of such".
I like the spirit of this video. Ecerything is possible if you make stuff up.
I did an experiment to determine the causal homophobia of men.
What I did is had a male stand at urinal on the end in a bathroom, while wearing a rainbow shirt.
When men would enter I would count how many urinals away from this man in the rainbow shirt they would stop before urinating.
Obviously the father away they stood the higher their homophobia.
The closer to him they were willing to stand the lower their inherent level of homophobia.
Needless to say every man that entered that bathroom was DEEPLY homophobic.
I guess it's a joke
So how do you know the studies on academic fraud (especially the anonymous ones you cited) aren't also fraudulent?
A side effect of a system where money is your god is that integrity is penalized while corruption is more often than not rewarded.
Matthew 19:24
These "psychology is not science/ is a joke" comments are so funny.
I'm currently working on a BS in a psychology sub-discipline, and many of my peers do not seem to have the same skepticism about "new research." The social sciences have been in a near-constant state of corruption due to philosophical biases since the beginning but have only in recent years had people doing it on purpose to make a point that they delusionally believe is ethically necessary. There is seemingly a coordinated effort to convince people that their white/European/male counterparts are all implicitly racist, disgusted with "the other," and striving for group dominance.
lmao
Stop insulting science, it is social studies.
@@thelordakirapsychology?
@@thelordakiraless bias psychology hater
This sounds like the setup to a joke that goes "How much time do you have?"
Where can I find that raw data investigation video?
I suffer from a minor undefined mental disorder; over time this has been diagnosed as assburgers, then ADD, followed by autism in conjunction with various anxiety/ depressive disorders. I am not depressed, I am not anxious; what I am is intelligent enough to know when supposed professionals in corrupt institutions are creating medical conditions in order to sell expensive drugs on behalf of billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies. I no longer seek medical counsel, I am my own medical counsel; every pharmaceutical drug I’ve ever been prescribed, I have dropped or replaced with OTC/supplement alternatives that cost less, work better, with less side effects. We are at the point where doctors feel burdened having a 10 minute zoom call with a patient every 6 months… in countries like Canada, doctors prescribe assisted suicide as a treatment for depression; chemical sterilization for gays and those with gender dysmorphia. The medical establishment has given up their oath of “do no harm”, now embracing the regressive beliefs of eugenics and post-modern population control…
Part of a peer review needs to be an analysis of the dataset(s) by the reviewers. This will limit the fraud maybe.
Knowing this is the process means anybody who intends to publish a paper with fake data will do the basic statistical manipulation so that they pass.
That depends upon whether the reviewers want the data to be true or not.
@@oneproudbrowncoat we could just start requiring lab videos. For any counter answer there is a counter measure.
@@Mezog001 Then we'd still have to confirm the footage was genuine.
Why isn't it ok for a paper to show that a theory might be wrong? That's good information!
Because wrong theories are not lucrative.
A side effect of living in a society that worships money as their god. Is that honesty is punished while deception is rewarded.
I can only imagine how bad fraud makes the fraudster feel. I'm serious: you have to have low self-esteem.
In psychology there is quite a bit of purposeful misinterpretation. Either extra information is added to the sample or sample bias is created at the begining of the experiment. Also, Black studies, women's sudies and most sexually sudied are clearly designed with design bias and the misinterpretation of the data is at best highly selective.
From Freud to Fraud
Freud is a fraud too. He unveiled the widespread rampant abuse of children and the associated trauma and dysfunction it causes, but instead of blowing the whistle he was a like "yeah, all you victims actually just want to fuck your parents."
Absolute monster.
THis is fascinating. THank you so much for posting!! And go on pretending at parties. I would naturally gravitate to your conversation group. Philosophers think very well (my husband is one, I know).
It is everywhere. But the worst IMHO is where political and corporate pressure is at play.
We cannot expect the same laboratory grade ontological rigor from psychologists that we do from chemists and engineers. Such is not possible in the 'soft sciences'.
Ever hear of Lysenko? The hard sciences can suffer just as much, in the wrong environment.
Because psychology is studying abstract concepts which you cannot see or hold unlike a piece of rock or metal
'Psychology as Science' is predicated entirely on the practice of statistical analysis and the erroneous assumption that correlation actually is causation.
It all started with Sigmund Fraud.
Imagine my shock. Fraudsters might be draw to the field of Psychology. I propose that the vast majority of Psychology is fabricated. Accurate Psychology studies are extremely rare. It is the field of choice for the untrustworthy. I propose a Psychologist is more likely than not to be dishonest. I further propose that the more successful a Psychologist is the more likely they are to be a fraudster. There are few fields in which fraud is more incentivised. Obviously.
Universities themselves reward and higher professors who have made themselves well-known through some kind of revolutionary findings.
The university wants their name attached to the work so that they become more prestigious, it's a form of marketing.
I think that right there is where the problem starts.
( guy enter room shaking )
Doctor Psychologist person: You seem.. distressed
Guy: 'gasp' you don't say!