The scandal that shook psychology to its core
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ส.ค. 2022
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In 2011, a scandal broke in psychology that made everyone question whether any of its research could really be believed. For the last decade, psychology has grappled with the aftermath and has tried to understand what went wrong. The ensuing crisis of confidence comes from a replication crisis in the field that we’ve seen over and over through all of science. So… what now?
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Instead of “publish or perish,” psychology needs a culture of “replicate or retire”.
We need to stop publishing for a few years and work on the old work and replicate it all, then we can get a better understanding of what is true.
People mustn’t be forced to retire when they find fudged research.
@@Stretesky Yeah, my phrasing is quippy, but probably too aggressive. I just want a world where replication studies are rewarded as much as exploratory-research studies.
It seems like replication studies would be the perfect kind of work for grad students to do.
@@seeranos I understand and want the same.
@@seeranos We live in a sound bite world - I am backing "replicate or retire", it might be snappy enough to get some funding for and publication of replication studies.
My brothers phd was originally replicating quite a well known study about gut microbiome of rats affecting their brains. He went to great efforts to make sure all his rats were exactly the same strain as the original study, and actually found a higher quality source for the feed with less nutrient variability, and was super careful with all his methods. And he found absolutely no results whatsoever. He was quite upset and anxious for a while that his whole PhD had been a failure and no one would publish his study because it contradicted this famous one and everyone would think he’d just screwed up somehow
One of my PhD students conducted a genomics study. Funded by venture capitalists who invested more than $650k. We discovered not only that the hypothesis didn’t work but the field is largely gobbledygook. He presented his findings at a conference at a world leading genomics institute in Europe. He was hired before the day ended. This is largely due to identifying where everyone were using flawed probabilistic inference and limited methodologies. Please relay this story to your brother. A PhD is merely a training programme and he should not doubt his ability. Negative studies are important and gut-brain theory is like squinting at the stars and picking your preferred asteroid as being important. Best of luck to him.
What did the study indicate? Consistant diet affects the gut but seems to have little or no effect on brain function.
Which study did he try to replicate?
Well, someone screwed up
Or someone lied.
Professor in Statistics here. Just two comments: firstly, one would expect researchers to involve statisticians in their statistical anslysis but that is rarely the case, and secondly, I dare to say, research in empirical economics is generally much more erratic than in psychology.
They cant and wont, ever. I am not educated, but I really dont have to be in 2023 to understand what is taking place. One would expect any form of "validated information" to be cross referenced through virtually every other highly specialized field in order to rule out the possiblity of their data being cross contaminated by a souce that the research has zero knowledge about. I will give an example. If you take mental illness as a prime example. Generally, if you're suffering from any of the infinite symtoms of mental illness, you will be sent to probably a specialist and given a magical pill (cause there is a pill for everything it seems). Well, if you compare the nutritional data over the past, say, 100 years, and you realize the general population consumes very unbalanced diets, and then if you compare the symtoms of nutrient dificiencies then you're confronted with the realization that nurtrient dificiency has the exact same symptoms as clinical mental health issues..... There are far more examples, but if my logic isnt sound please let me know. I actually have been meaning to have a sit down with someone widely accepted as more intelligent than I am in order to figure out my intelligence lol.... I mean, you're a professor, Marilyn Vos Savant is a perfect example of incredible intelligence being attacked by Ph.D's and scholars, mathmaticians, and she turned out to be correct....
Not surprised to learn that economics research is iffy, to put it politely.
👋🏽 If I make it on the other side of this durn program, I will GLADLY hire a statistician! I even told my Quant Methods professor this last year 😅
That must be why it’s not uncommon for economists to publish in the Journal of American Statistical Association! Economics as a discipline is unparalleled in how carefully it engages in causal inference. If you were a statistician, you’d know that.
@@33invasion Lmao actually defending economic research
We need more people brave enough to publish ‘non results’.
"Bravery" alone doesn't put food on the table. A more apt approach would be change the incentive structure of science.
But then the brave and honest scientists don’t get the research grants, and only those researchers willing to hush up failures and fudge the numbers to get exciting results have successful careers. Which is pretty much what we have now
Publish them to whom exactly? You would be better off having a Twitch streamer release the findings as their own, because intelligence is supressed in this society.
Maybe there should be journals that only publish null results? Like, short of fundamentally changing rhe incentive structure (which should totally happen, but is an enormous project) is it possible to, at least in the here and now, promise that there will be a home for null results?
We need more poor people you mean. If you want to make money, you have to fudge your results otherwise no company will fund you. What needs to be done is having a government body fund and conduct all research or severe consequences when it's clear research has been tampered with.
The problem is not the Science, the problem is the system. Publishers hold too much power and researchers depend too much on grants that do not consider much more than number of publications. It is vicious cycle, that can spiral downwards quickly: no positive results-> manuscript not accepted in any relevant journal -> no grants -> no money to do more research -> no more results -> no more publications, etc. Many researchers depend on grants not only for their projects, but also for their salary. So you can easily see the point of failure, if your way of life depends on positive results, and you don’t have them, there is only one way out.
Unfortunately you could also argue that many take advantage of said grants
Both are true and both the theory are conceived from some human mind....One thing that is of my personal opinion... Humans have stopped thinking..I just vaguely recollect Oscar Wilde quote...which was like' most people are other people's opinion and other people's quote'... When the author felt that in his time to be true....atleast someone else's opinion was relevant and true that gave some meilage. Now as most of us humans have stoped to think and have exhausted even the conclusive thoughts of some genuine thought or research...we truly are in a crisis of fresh thoughts and fresh actions . Thanks to AI , thanks to Augmentive reality and others that make the impossible possible , I really did enjoy the talk of this subject and wish you well.
Right, the problem isn't with science or statistics, it's with the economic incentives in the publishing system.
The process isn't flawed. The agendas behind it are.
No wonder the hard sciences want to guard against getting grouped with soft sciences.
I saw a lot of this behavior while working on my PhD. There is such strong pressure to get positive, confirmatory results, researchers will twist the data any way necessary.
I know you're being truthful but I can't help but giggle at the thought of you doing the same in your own study... Ah, the irony
Its incredible how easy or quickly it happens. I've been TA for many courses and I always have hammerd on doing this as planned out (and first really plan things out properly). Not adjusting hypothesis afterwards and not suddenly adding variables etc. But is is kinda brushed off by some others. I also feel like some of the researchers I worked don't seem to value carefull planning.
Because science is about trying to find out the truth of the world, or reality or the fact, or overall knowledge. There is no room for nothing other than positive confirmatory results
@@marybean2231 Would certainly be ironic if he actually does that but that's unconfirmed
I encountered that in my master thesis in ecology. I was not asked to change data, but given my skills in statistics, I was asked to torture the numbers further. This is what tipped most my decision not to continue for a PhD despite the offers.
I firmly believe that the first year of a PhD, or at least for master's capstone projects, students should be spending their time validating other people's experiments.
Makes sense. Why not demand at least one study from a PhD to be a replication study?
@@vio1583 There is a big elephant in the PhD room, which is the requirment to demonstrate original research in order to have ones proposal accepted. Sometimes the research is so original that nobody ever takes up the challenge of trying to replicate it.
My wife did this and found that both previous PhDs had major flaws in their work and procedures that don’t do anything. She is a chemical engineer…
this is a problem because receiving your PhD becomes contingent on "validating" work, in other words as a newcomer you will be afraid to question the seniors and might just propogate errors
@@birdmusic1206I respectfully disagree, the proposition is not you receive your PhD by Validating other publications. The proposition is: a contributing factor to receiving your PhD is by doing the actual work that is needed to validate or disprove a publication. And if many students find errors over and over again then a spot light would be put on that specific publication. This helps to put a check and balance in place.
I feel like we need a catalogue of the null hypothesis, where scientists can publish like a two to three pages report on Failed or inconclusive studies. Make it searchable and that'd be an amazing resource for future scientists to see what pitfalls to avoid. And it would probably take less resources to create and run than Wikipedia or other such websites.
it will benefit academia but not any industry. And no industry wants that as it will leave proof of the lies they try to build.
I think that's a decent step.
Let's document studies that have been repeated over and over with null-significant results so they aren't repeated multiple times over.
Still, with the way research is financially motivated, that will not be enough.
agreed!
Great idea!!
Great idea
In the Navy we used to say, "You don't get what you expect, you get what you inspect." If you reward publications, you get publications; if you reward research you get research.
here we used to say: logic ends where army begins.
@@user-ox6nc6ly7f
I would be careful with popular expressions, warfare is one of the most difficult arts. I would like to see how someone conducts the logistics of an operation with thousands of troops without a certain logic ..
The problem is that inspecting already supposes a certain predisposition, you are inspecting with a certain objective in mind (i.e. some "expectations"), and that objective is precisely the one that can introduce biases (both in the one that produces the data and in the one that inspects).
On the other hand, if I award research, research is certainly going to proliferate like weed, but how do you discriminate between bad and good weed?
In my Psych 101 course, when asked, our professor admitted that the field attracts people with mental problems, but stated that exposure to the field during their studies often gave students sufficient insight to drop out. This is no longer true. Over many decades, the requirement for personal therapy to attain a degree in Psychology has dropped from 40 hours to 24 hours to 8 hours to, at many institutions, "highly recommended," i.e., zero. At the same time, tuition costs have gone up by a factor of ten or more. Fewer students drop out and kiss goodbye to tens of thousands of dollars already invested in their education. The field is in deep trouble, and the consequences in education, research, and clinical psychology are outrageous.
So your comment is that you believe “personal therapists” have
@@MrJCerqueira Vs decades ago, as stated.
I got my undergrad with no such requirement, decades ago. Was that not the norm?
@@ElizabethMillerTX It may have been fairly common, depending on how their graduate degrees were structured.
@@MrJCerqueira I think it means "people used to have to get therapy on their own personal issues before starting therapist training"
It's worse when doctors are then advised to treat patients based off of flawed studies.
See: the psychopharmaceutical industry
Then never go to a doctor.
@@ckwind1971in pharmacy is more of a case of pure monetary leverage
@@lukecarey613exactly, there's a lot more history and bodies of work that have passed the test of time, if people want to stoo going to the doctor because outliers, they are free to get sick
@@lukecarey613 This is unironically good advice. Do not ever go to a doctor unless you know exactly what it is you want looked at and are willing to challenge the doctor.
You probably didn't intend that though lol.
I remember when I was back in university we used to make fun of psychology and medical science to be "easier" than math and the harder sciences. We were never convinced of many of the results coming out of psychology because of the lack of rigour and lack of quantitative literacy among those who studied the softer sciences.
We were always made to seem like assholes for pointing these things out and maybe we could have framed things more nicely, but I'm glad to see more gradual mainstream recognition of the failure within the softer science fields.
One thing we were completely wrong about, though, is that the softer sciences were "easier" than the hard sciences. The complete opposite is what is true. The hard sciences are what are easier since we can arrive at more well-defined answers in those fields. The amount of complexity involved in the softer sciences is mind-numbing to say the least. I have a lot of respect for anyone who ventures in search of the truth and I have no doubt that, as the softer science fields mature and develop more tools and methods to aid in their study, we will arrive at some amazing insights.
I'm grateful to be witnessing this inflection point in these fields and I'm excited to see what we uncover. The other possibility is that we are approaching the limits of what we can understand with science and mathematical modelling and that makes me feel differently, but still grants me a sense of awe at the wonders of the universe. Maybe we will need something completely different from traditional science and math to gain further understanding of the world. We can never know everything there is to know and that's hard to accept, but not unfathomable. We already have examples of things we will never know from studies in Cosmology.
Scanning the brain, simulating the brain and AI might be a solution in the future to create rigorous testing in psychology
Im not sure about this because theses tools are put on a pedestal while they're easy to missuse and can be the source of quite a lot of pbs.... +humans sciences are way too complexe to solely relay on it
(we all know that it would be an issue)
Im not sure about this because theses tools are put on a pedestal while they're easy to missuse and can be the source of quite a lot of pbs.... +humans sciences are way too complexe to solely relay on it
(we all know that it would be an issue)
Im not sure about this because theses tools are put on a pedestal while they're easy to missuse and can be the source of quite a lot of pbs.... +humans sciences are way too complexe to solely relay on it
(we all know that it would be an issue)
Im not sure about this because theses tools are put on a pedestal while they're easy to missuse and can be the source of quite a lot of pbs.... +humans sciences are way too complexe to solely relay on it
(we all know that it would be an issue)
I remember studying statistics for psychology and thinking "Wow, so I can say my findings either disprove the null or don't disprove the null according to how I slide this p-value between .05 and .01!" It was a WTF moment.
Absolutely... the alpha level should be set in the study plan prior to running the subjects.... Call it Pre-procedural Alpha... it should rarely ever change after the study has been run.... the people who change it are misconstruing alpha-level with effect size... Many researchers have told told me that my idea on this is nuts
In modern statistics education, people are going away from the idea of having a cut-off for the significance level at all. Instead the p-value simply gives you the probability, that the data was generated by random chance. You should then interpret based off this p-value on a case-by-case basis.
Yes, same here. That's why we need to always have access to the real data and read it, how they calculated it. Is this tiresome? Yes. Is this science, yes :)
Same here
I had a bit of a crisis when I found out that the threshold/criterion for "statistically significant" was completely arbitrarily decided.
Math is excellent at revealing the truth. It's even better at hiding it.
We are finally recognizing, actually more so acknowledging our true human nature's. We will manipulate anything to everything as to be achieving our desires. And as far as math is concerned, it is a factitious construct, taking many forms. When you really analyze how it has come to be. You can readily apperceive to what extents & degrees it has & yet continues to be, in far to many promulgatory scientific precedents, twisted, bent, etc. to fit within or to force our human agendas to work out. It is not that math can not be legitimately applied & utilized. It is that we factitiously bias & even corrupt it, to achieve our means & ends. I have gone down many a rabbit hole, only developing great consternation upon discerning the extraneous manipulations of the applied mathematics. Many would like believe math is everything. Nature knows no factitious math, but nature does wholistically apply informations & they are not exactly the identical language. They can be close or similar but only if we don't place our foot on the scale.
.
A couple of my favourite quotes:
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
He uses statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support not illumination.
That's why you need proper review including a statistician.
I remember in a Linguistics class I took as an undergrad, our final project was a research project based on language data and my hypothesis was completely unable to be supported one way or the other based on the data we had to work with. My professor was SO THRILLED when I stood up there, described my hypothesis and research design, all the effort I took towards proving it, and then went "and I still have no idea." It was honestly a great learning experience.
My x wife is a biological research scientist (meaning she designs drugs and medical treatments) and from her I can tell you that the problems found in psychology research are actually pretty common across all medical research. The process of handling and interpreting the data is often manipulated to give the desired result to ensure funding.
It is, quite a few physics and cancer research papers are poorly done or just a flat-out lie/manipulation. It's pervasive in every aspect of scientific research and the whole standard of publication and research needs to change.
Former PhD candidate here (with a background in psychology). Publish or perish, p-hacking and even p-value itself were extensively discussed within the field while I was doing my PhD (in cognitive neuroscience, or specifically neuroeconomics). Personally, I preferred using Bayesian inferences when it comes to statistics. But there’s many problems why scientists face the replication crises:
1. The sugar daddy of science: in theory, you don’t need to be a good scientist. You need to be a good marketer and a good salesperson to get the grant. Yes, and I was a part of a EU grant with billions of €€ but bullshit research plans.
2. Academic politics: following what I stated above, when the higher up is focused on using the €€ to buy fancy new tools, the lower-ranked PhD researchers as as myself (previously) became tools as well. We had no say in anything, we were just means to the end.
3. No one cares: with €€, power, and politics involved. Who’ll care if anyone is doing good science? It’s about publishing results right? So who cares about the PhD student, assign a shitty supervisor who doesn’t care, write bullshit things in the reports.
P.s. the general rule for my PhD was to publish 3 papers in 3 years. And the two studies I was involved in did not have any “positive” results so to speak.
“I thought I had something there but it wasn’t significant” 😆😆🤣 that was the wittiest p-value joke of them all.
"No significant results, negative results etc", are also results and should be published. Those findings are important too. If we are really capable of learning, those findings at the very least, can show researchers what not to do next time. Just a thought 🤔.
They should publish the no-result studies. Doesn't have to take up much space - just the titlle, abstract, result summary and a link to the data.
I firmly believe that if you're an honest researcher you will struggle to get work. Company's will turn to researchers who give them the results they pay for. The incentive system is fucked.
There is no such thing as "no result".
@@stavroskarageorgis4804 True. How about "null result" or "hypothesis not supported". Still, I think you know what I mean.
This is so weird to me. In medicine, in my experience, people publish null results all the time. “Is this treatment better than this other one?” “There is no diference” “ok, publish in the new england journal of medicine”
Right. It's so odd, this prejudice (or fear of) towards null-results.
I mean, it's not *that* odd considering what the personal career stakes are.
Its so important to spread this topic beyond psychology and academia so people are not swayed by glamorous and exciting sounding results.
I'll be starting a PhD in personality psychology soon and part of the reason I've chosen my lab to work in was their commitment to open science.
Yes!! Science needs to better serve society and people, not society have to serve (and be intimidated and misconstrue) science. A world with open science is not only a world full of knowledge to understand itself but a world full of knowledge to help make itself better.
What you say gives me hope, Yana. We really need more ethical researchers like you to eventually bring about permanent change to the current perverse incentive structure.
Serious question, though, how do you make people reject excitement and glitter? Most people *intellectually* assent that sound research and simplicity and hard work are good things, but you get that same person into a room full of shiny objects, and watch their heads spin.
@daisyviluck7932 that is a difficult question! I found that in my field people are pretty sceptical and there's almost a culture of holding people to a standard of openness, reanalysing and reproducing results (which apparently is a complete 180 from say 10 years ago). I think it helps that some of the big names in open science (eg Simine Vazire!!) have come from personality psychology and are pretty vocal about changing norms.
There's nothing wrong with studies that aren't replicated. It just means there was a flaw before. The real problem is studies where the replication hasn't been attempted are put forward as knowledge, and used to make decisions.
There are many reasons why a study may fail to replicate. It doesn't always mean there was a flaw.
Exploring those reasons is where it starts to get interesting
Im a 1st year psych student. Here in UK they have been talking a lot about how journals should encourage people differently. Some journals are trying to publish research, no matter the p value will come out, by reviewing the methodology and accepting it before research is completed.
I am excited about this as it seems to be a step to the right direction.
As a member of the public. We are often told/taught that science is strong because it is replicable and that what the data shows is the result. Now I knew you could abuse the data to get what result you want. But I didn't realize how wide spread all this is.
I love the obnoxious hubris of humanity, we assume that we know so much and that we’ve figured it all out until one guy tries to prove psychic phenomena and all hell breaks loose.
Right?!!? Why is this one of the human practices we see thoughtout almost all previous civilizations - you know?? Clearly there something there
Scientists have the highest hubris of all. They generally treat non-scientists like absolute morons. Meanwhile, back at the ranch their beloved ideas are 90% p-hacked .
How do you build a machine to test for something that we don't know is there.
Well like everyone of these jackasses with a PhD have to cling to the system their indoctrinated into and worked their ass off to serve so it's kinda hard for those fuckers to think outside the bun
@@antonyjh1234that's actually what a lot of particle accelerator experiments are all about. The math says we should see a certain particle, but we don't know if it's there, so they smash protons together at near-light-speed and hope it results in them seeing one of these particles.
As a PhD candidate who had formerly undertaken statistical research in a non academic context and actually studied statistics at a formal level before which involved understanding the concepts, I found that the research training for PhD candidates left a lot to be desired, particularly given the predominance of computer packages such as SPSS. Younger students simply did not have the formal understanding to know what they were doing in my opinion. As you say you can bludgeon almost anything into significance. What is most important in understanding research results from a critical perspective is not what they say, but how the conclusions were drawn and above all of most significance (in the non mathematical sense) is a sound methodology and thorough logical consideration of all the possible confounding factors. You know it is an old trope that most psychology is based upon white middle class college kids, who form an availability heuristic of willing research subjects.
If you wouldn't mind looking into this little theory that some of the world's well known geniuses were malicious since the mathematical odds of all of them being non malicious is probably very low. And at the very least extremely suspicious.
Damn this is a 🔥 comment. Your so smart you intimidate me 😂🥰
But wasn't that a goal of early statistics -- to produce believable numbers? Many of those theorists were social Darwinists/ eugenicists who wanted to make the differences between people significant.
@@lovingdemon2932not sure what you mean by "malicious", but you're making a logical error. "It's unlikely all of them were not malicious" =/= "it is likely most of them were malicious". Isn't is just as unlikely that most of them were malicious, whatever that means? "It is unlikely all dogs are not rabid" =/= "it is likely most dogs are rabid"
This! I desperately wanted to take an advanced stats class during my PhD, but my supervisor didn't think it was necessary. I worried that, since I didn't have a deep understanding of stats, I might well be using the wrong tests, etc.
It's not just psychology. This issue has been discovered in other disciplines as well...
It certainly has!
Many years ago I submitted a research paper- my first major research project. It was rejected outright. A few months later, I ran into a senior colleague at a research meeting who told me " I rejected your paper because I didn't think you could actually do the analyses. And I thought" why would he think that?" Now I know he was projecting his own dishonesty. I left academia after that.
I was expected to accept my lecturers claims at face value when doing psychology and I could see that the research seemed to lack strong empirical evidence and replication.
The rest of the class seemed to eat it up.
Today most of what they taught us has been proven wrong... but some people are still spouting it.
Always been wary of psychology because of how many people it has mislead.
🙂
Didn't think YOU could do the analysis, because HE should. I have seen Professors in Engineering, outright lie they observed a phenomena, they personally observed it due to their great insight, with a great story of how it happened to them personally, when a student or research assistant did and told them.
Great and detailed video - two thoughts to add from me...
(1) You opened with Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future" study, but it was never mentioned again?! After hearing he rigorously replicated it himself 9 times, I was expecting to hear how he either did it "wrong" (and if so, how), or did it "right" (and if so, what a can of worms that opens up). Dean Radin and others are consistently shunned for investigating psi phenomena, despite taking rigorous research approaches. I'd love to hear more to tie this all together.
(2) I believe researchers should be required to make ALL their data open and public. You argued that this might not be a good idea because researchers might not have the ability to properly organise their data for public release... I appreciate you followed that up joking it's not too much to expect, and I totally agree! Why can't every study require its data to be released publicly, regardless of how nicely formatted it might be? Just adding the requirement would encourage researchers to ensure their data is well-organised (thus improving its accuracy), but also allow for anyone to make their own analyses after the fact. There should be NO expectation on academic journals to conduct their own replications on the data - leave this for the public or other researchers to do after-the-fact. Journals should still demand the same rigorous standards, just ensuring that data is made open as a requirement too. When unbelievable studies are published based on meeting publication requirements, other researchers can then attempt to replicate them with access to the same underlying data too. This is imperative to computer science, where open-source research has advanced the field exponentially in recent years.
Good point! I probably should’ve explained the issues with Bem’s research. It essentially boils down to engaging in the questionable research practices that I was talking about. So he constructed his hypothesis after collecting data (HARKing) and even his statistical analysis is highly suspect (possible p-hacking). If you run a different test with the same data, the results disappear. As for open science, yeah, I think it should become the norm to make it all public. I think we’d need widely-available, free sites to host the data. That might make it easier.
Yeah I was very surprised Bem’s research wasn’t brought up again in the video! I was looking forward to a resolution to it, but never got it. Good thing I found it down in the comments :)
Great point. I believe Brian Nosek started such a project about a decade ago, called The Center for Open Science. I believe his very goal was to create a platform that would allow researchers to upload raw data sets and make this available to the public for independent analysis. I remember keeping an eye on this endeavour and was shocked that it never gained the momentum it deserved. In retrospect, it makes only perfect sense.
Great points.
I would be very interested to see some analyses of the replication crisis phenomenon in relation to its 'political importance'.
I get the impression that 'politically expedient outcomes' requiring scientific paper(s) to point to, use all-the-above methodologies to construct a faux scientific basis.
Access to the original data is the absolute necessity of a trusted scientific institution. Maybe a real-time on-line platform documenting the progress of studies is possible?
Bro his paper wasn't the point, the point was he used their scientific methods to "show" that esp exists
It was like a reductio ad absurdum for the entire field
I was a psych major around 1998-2002. I started learning about unscrupulous studies from pharmaceutical companies, specifically about the SSRIs I had taken for 20+ years. Great essay, I learned and marveled.
Edit: I took Statistics twice (2 different schools) and barely passed with Cs both times. If I'd had to produce a whole study it might have been all over 😂
it would be nice if there was a place people could post all the negative results. Even if it wasn’t officially peer reviewed, there would still be feedback from comments by other researchers and there would probably be minimal intentional fraud.
Same problem exists in other fields, remember going to our bioinformatics department and asking which clustering algorithms to use for a certain type of data and I was asked how many populations I want to have...
Idk why, but the idea that everything we might know about psychology is wrong, sorta excites me, as someone who is studying psychological science one of the things I love about experiments is the ability to replicate them and see if anything is different, and if you find something different yyou can go on a trip to find out why or predict a phenomenon that no one had looked at yet. There are so many possibilities on what you can learn and from a different perspective
It's such a fun science bc the brain is constantly changing and we're always getting more information on how people react in different situations
Yeah, it so fun, is it?!? Messing with people’s lives with unfounded and inaccurate theories?? Do patients a favor and stay in the lab until science figures out how to instill empathy and humanity. But look on the bright side…they’ll never pick out the bodies from the carnage of the opioid epidemic. Shhhh!
Thanks for sharing this perspective! I’m a prospective psych masters student so the current state of the field seems a lil bit bleak but you framed this in a really optimistic and exciting way. I appreciate it!
@@bloops444 No problem, I’m glad I was able to offer a new perspective on your field of study. I think it’s important to remember while we operate in patterns, human behavior is often nuanced, and it doesn’t hurt to question established research. That’s what science is about! Questioning what’s been found to make it stronger and update the work done by scientists who didn’t have access to as much information as we do! You’re doing important work even if it seems bleak
I had a professor back in the old days who said the way you tackle the p-hacking problem is you only allow the testing of hypotheses which have an a priori reason to justify further investigation. I know, too vague to apply in practice.
That's only one layer of the problem, this video didn't even get to the most serious ones such as the government selectively funding research that gives the result they want and defunding the ones they don't want, leading to the production of studies that rely entirely on fake data for their conclusions and no one attempting to replicate the findings.
@@kirito3082 what are some examples of those studies?
The fact is that scientific advance and knowledge is a national security issue. The best science is kept under wraps until it can't be held secret anymore. Lesser science struggles for funding and bad results are allowed to stand because even though it doesn't benefit us, neither does it benefit our adversaries.
OMG, THIS!!! This is what people are failing to grasp, and the brainwashing isn't helping the populace grasp this concept... We are in the age of intellectual supression, and if you're an innovator that doesn't follow the strict ignorance taught in traditional schooling, and you actually innovate, then you're going to have failing health quickly, or vanish lol.... I mean... If you really dig deep into the science from the first industrial revolution up to the 50's the technological advancements are MIND BLOWING, simply Star Trek level competence, its astounding how truly truly genius these inventions were, and that was during a time where someone labled a genius was shot directly into celebrity status, but since that 3rd industrial revolution all of that has ceased to be the case... Hell, the man who theorized the God Particle had to sell his Nobel Price in order to pay his medical bills, but people like Taylor Swift will live forever on their incredible amounts of wealth... I promise the private sector is 100's of years more advanced than we are today, and until they have to release technology, they wont, unless it is to control the world....
Out of my experience as a coach for PhD students, the statistical bs that's going on in computer science or economics is 🤥. I had more than one student wanting to quit science bc the professor was engaging them to "make the effects better for pubclicating" 😅. Usually those professors have had a tremendous list of different "A" - journal entries. To a point where I am suspicious now towards those "unbelievable successful" Professors. 😮
I had a hard time with telling those students , not to quit science but change the professor. One is a prof now himself 😊 and a good, honest one.
But organizational wise, my hands are tied until today to expose those "successful" professors questionable research practices...
Another annoying thing is how the sample is conducted, either it's Amazon Turk or students (usually first semester), hence not representative at all...
While delivering a lecture in class discussing the chapter Standard continuous probability distributions, an assertion was made by someone, 'But, the numbers don't lie as we all know'. In reply, she told, 'The data must be fed to the system of equations appropriately'. Now I see that it also applies elsewhere in all disciplines other than raw hardcore convoluted pure mathematics and statistics. Truly amazing!
As an outpatient social worker I also was Intrigued about the need for positive results and ignoring unfounded or negative results because when you’re working with a client there’s wisdom and anything and everything they say. Meeting goals give info and there’s reasons why a client doesn’t meet their treatment goals and there’s information in that as well and it’s ““ unsuccessful“ but there’s still a Why
The video discusses the "replication crisis" in psychology, where many influential studies have failed to replicate or have much smaller effect sizes when replication is attempted. This calls into question what research in psychology we can actually rely on.
One major contributing factor is publication bias - journals favor publishing positive, exciting results rather than null or negative results. This skews the literature.
There are also issues with researchers engaging in "p-hacking" - manipulating data or analyses until significant results are obtained. This leads to false positives.
Questionable research practices are very common, often unintentionally. Things like flexibility in data analysis, lack of transparency, and small sample sizes contribute to non-reproducibility.
Solutions involve focusing more on study preregistration, sharing data, placing less emphasis on positive results, and changing incentives in academia to value replication more. Overall more rigor, transparency, and replication is needed.
The host argues psychology has made a lot of progress in the last decade on these issues, and this "existential crisis" may ultimately improve the field by leading to more robust and reproducible research.
There is absolutely no way to replicate EVERY variable. If we were smart enough to not EVER say ANYTHING was an absolute truth, we'd begin on the path of honest science.
1:09 "ESP, the ability to sense the future".
That's not what ESP means; ESP is an acronym standing for "Extra Sensory Perception" and is an umbrella term for everything involving a sixth sense.
The alleged ability to specifically sense the future is called Precognition.
As someone who was diagnosed with MDD at 42, ptsd at age 55 , and ASD at 57 i can say with certainty that psychology and psychiatry are broken. I had ptsd and asd at age 42. I was hospitalized for 6 weeks, had meltdowns, severe sensory issues, couldn't eat the foid, and no one tried to connect the dots. I could have been diagnosed with aspergers at the time, but they couldn't be bothered to look deeper than the 15 minute evaluation the original psychiatrist did.
My issue with psychology is that it's fully arbitrary when it comes to find a difference between health and illness. Potentially any behaviour society doesn't like can be considered a disease. Example is homosexuality which was a illness in the past and now no longer since society accepted it. Some pacifists were accused of being insane for not wanting millions of people killing each other in WW1
Freud and most of his early following considered homosexuality a „normal“ variation. And Kinsey confirmed it’s prevalence. When it came to GB and USA the DSM was written up redesignating it as a disease.
But the reason for that was specifically from the idea in Freud of „societal norms“. So they could recategorize based on society.
Freud’s position was that because it in and of itself did not inhibit adaptive functioning it should be considered normal.
It is not arbitrary in the true sense of the word. It does however border on a type of ethical philosophy in the ancient sense of that idea, for example the Stoics.
@@matthewkopp2391 still, defining abnormal what inhibits you to adapt to society is arbitrary
Not all mental illness designations are arbitrary. Psychosis being one of those disorders. But there is always a risk of pathologizing completely normal behaviors
@@konyvnyelv. arbitrary by definition is random or whim as apposed to reason. There are other types of reason that are not scientific material reductionist.
I don’t believe making it a mental illness was either random or based on whim. Perhaps a better word that would suit your argument would relative ethos.
My position is that much of psychology is not science it is a philosophical ethos which negotiates well being of the individual in relationship to society.
The fact that people think it is hard science is problematic. It is informed by science, restrained by the probabilities of science but is not science.
@@matthewkopp2391I see your point. Hard to not find validity in it.. In all "soft" science while we are at it.
But I would find personally, a world without the field of psychology to explain some of our behaviors even more prone to various forms of self deceiving... Just imagine having savere depression, and everyone in your life that knows of you, constantly calling you lazy..Without knowing that it is an illness, that you might battle with it, either through discipline, specific diet or medication or all of them together, for even a bit more will, hope... your self worth would just deflate, negative thought patterns would duplicate until only logical solution would be the one that ain't a solution at all..
I just find human minds, and our ability to imagine, then try to engineer something into existence, one of main points of being a human, beside purely biological, to survive, conserve energy and reproduce.. The better we understand how they work, what they are capable, what is good and what is bad for them, more robust we become not just as individuals but also as a species.. We are just scratching the surface so far..
I just wish we could have science, for science sake. To satisfy our curiosity, to enrich humankind in different ways then just material. In the end, it might be the difference between surviving next 100 years, or slowly getting extinct.
I think the problem begins in grade school and high school learning that is over focused on right and wrong answers that fit testing methods instead of teaching people to be broad minded and see learning as exploration.
What I HATE is the system that connects being a good researcher with being a good teacher. One of the many things in a long list of things that are broken in American Universities.
If you had two books, one of every provable thing we really know about psychology and the other about all that they think they know about psychology you would end up with the first book about the size of a typical comic book and the second with about as many pages as the local library has in its books.
I've always considered psychology to be a bogus "science." I find the idea that human personality can be "studied" with the same level of confidence as other sciences like chemistry or geology or even biology to be ridiculous. There are too many smoky glasses to barely see through, too many fuzzy, uncategorizable factors, changes and variables to be able to reach any kind of reliable finding. As far as I'm concerned, all the major theories are no more than speculation masquerading as science. They hover around ideas and concepts that might be closer to the real truth than to falsehood, but that's about the best one can say for them. They aren't science. And I've had this feeling ever since "psychology" and what it means was first made known to me all the way back in elementary school. In university courses I never encountered any reason to change my mind. This is all just another example of how our culture has been so impressed with the results of using the scientific method that we have very, very wrongfully assumed that it could be applied to all aspects of reality -- and if reality doesn't cooperate, well reality can just go pound sand. Sorry. Some areas are just murky. They don't lend themselves the level of certainty we demand. And if we try to do it anyway, well. We end up in the situation this video is describing. And a lot of people are revealed to have been naive at best and dishonest and disrespectful of truth at worst. Know what? After listening to this whole video, here's what I think the answer to all this is: humility.
You can dee things like depression, ocd, anxiety and so forth in MRI scans
We can physically map out how these issues affect the brain. Psychology isnt just throwing random stuff at a wall, its using modern medical technology to try and make sense of the brain and its chemistry
Its like slagging off the whole field of sleep studies just because you personally think its too wishy washy without understanding the way they study the electrochemical signals produced in the brain
"the p-value sounds like incontinence medicine" had me laughing real hard
I had another one about it being a urine-based cryptocurrency, but I cut it 😂
8:31 "I thought I had another... but let's move on it wasn't significant" is the best of the p-value comments.
@@neurotransmissions One of my friends recorded videos of herself peeing standing up, then traded them for Bitcoins. (That was in 2014 or so.) Truth is stranger than fiction...
I remember starting my job and having total imposter syndrome for the first 2 months. I was stressing every single day, losing sleep at night in a perpetual state of fear each day might be my last there. I was essentially just waiting for the day I got called into my bosses office to be fired, but when I finally got what I thought was THAT call, it ended up being a call to pickup a 200$ gift card. I got employee of the month because I had the best numbers in my department that month lol. They also gave me a +2$/hour raise. I was FOR SURE underestimating my performance because I had nothing to compare it to nor any sort of metric to serve as a standard.
God damn can Netflix give this channel a call. This is just golden content.
Aw, thanks! 😊
Please put some respect to His name.
You think Netflix would pay them well or not?
I bet he could make more not being limited to Netflix
Netflix? Lol you think you could have a worse platform? Netflix is a damn joke
40 years ago I wrote an unpublished undergrad psych paper covering most of the issues you so eloquently cover here. My research methods professor pulled me into his office and soundly chewed me out. I forced him to accept the paper, and of course he gave me a poor grade, which I took before the academic dean. After the academic committee reviewed both sides, the paper was returned the second time with a perfect score. I’m sure smarter people than I who were post-doc raised similar issues back then, so the harder question is how do we as a society demand academia to get their shit together. Pretty tough in a society which seems increasingly to only value profit and wealth. Those are ultimately the pressures behind a great deal of this. We can’t even get our congress to cooperate on agreeing on bathroom protocol (tongue thoroughly planted in cheek). Sigh.
Change capitalism to communism.
I seem to have missed the part where the ESP and pre-cognition studies were found to be non-replicable.
My family have been telling me my entire life that my personal thoughts and memories I share are false.
They believe they can read minds, and I think many others do as well.
So, while it is probably mostly (completely?) nonsense, it is very intriguing that people KNOW they know what other people think-even when the subject tells them otherwise.
Humans are insane.
Maybe the emphasis should be on falsification, not on replication. This is what Karl Popper said is the proper scientific method. In other words, design an experiment to disprove the candidate hypothesis, don't just leave it hanging in the air as not significant. Ok, not many hypotheses will yield concrete results if treated this way, but you never hear of any experiments designed to falsify.
Tenure should not even be a thing.
I can’t think of any professional I would hire whose performance would be better if they couldn’t be fired.
There's only two options for Psychology. It either has to step up it's game or go to oblivion. A student of psychology here !
Stepping up its game would require just one thing: lopping of every bit of it that would result in an increased risk of bullshit being proclaimed truth. We would lose psychanalysis (good) and humanism (also good) because neither is amenable to experimental examination. Much of cognitivism would go, since that requires inferences to be made on the basis of behaviour alone, be it at the organism-environment level or at the cellular activity level.
We would be left with behaviour analysis and neurology.
@@DavidAndrewsPEC I agree with you. If it remains at this state then it doesn't deserved to be categorized as "science". Shouldn't be nothing more than just literature.
@@freemindas Exactly.
I gave up on psychoanalysis and humanism ... you cannot do science on them. And they refuse to accept the idea of operational definitions that would make counting possible.
@@DavidAndrewsPEC I once asked one of my professors to elaborate on the replication crisis issue in psychology research. All she said was it's also a problem in other discipline research dodging so answering my direct question! There's a lot to be done in this field. It's far from being a real science whether we like it or not.
Notes on Main Ideas
2011- Pyscologist Daryl Ben discovered its possible to sense the future. He sent the results to The Journal of Personality and Social Pyscology, which resulting in a reckoning in pyscology.
2015-Reproducibility Project Pyscology: 27 scientists discovered only 36% of studies had replicated results
2017- Nature and Science; 62% had replicated results
This is why the only people who take the social sciences seriously are people *in* the social sciences.
I'm so happy I discovered your channel. What a brilliantly put together video! Thank you for this, I think you're spot on with everything.
Some issues that I and others I've met have had is how inherently reductionist research is required to be. How can we possibly factor in cultural differences and beliefs, feelings of safety, perception of self, social identity, community activities, social status, location, housing insecurity, political oppression, disability, minority stress, perceptions of trauma etc all at once? Lived Experience has so many factors and psychology's perception of "problem is with the self" only helps to a degree. Maybe someone doesn't need to get better and it's their environment that does need to get better.
It also assumes that a "normal" and "unwell" exists, but this is cultural and has led to many within the Lived Experience movement to see psychology as just another tool of oppression and medical abuse.
It also assumes that "statistical anomalies" are at fault and treated as "too complex" because we can't find a cure or make them normal, and so, they are then dehumanised by medical staff and therapists.
There are 7 billion unique understandings and experiences with entirely different and unique understandings and ways of thinking. Is it realistic to think that we'll ever find something shared by them all?
There has been a very distinct lack of Lived Experience within research and it has led many within the field to not hold trust in it.
I remembered there is a journal/website on flopped experiments. As also many biology and chemistry (?) studies fail because of replication issues. It kan help phd students also to figure out which methods to gain certain protein structures don't actually work.
Do you remember its name by any chance? It would be useful due to the area of research I'm dedicated to but if you don't remember it's fine
5:45 + You are an absolutely brilliant researcher and producer, thank you for working on & making this for us.
I lost all confidence in psychology as a science when this stuff first came to light. To this day, I am deeply skeptical of the field as a whole.
I’m currently doing honours in psychology and the Australian university I go to teaches about the replication crisis as part of learning about systematic reviews. It is possible to detect publication bias through statistical analysis in the review process, but obviously that doesn’t solve the problem of it happening in the first place.
Fudging data to get published, and journals selectively publishing need to be called out more quickly.
It kinda feels like journals should add a special stamp/seal/mark on studies that replicate or have been replicated by other studies, so that everyone can know to take those studies more seriously, compared to studies without that stamp/seal/mark.
It was never addressed if the 2011 research on Esp ended up being replicable or not, I was kinda hoping there would be a resolution like his study was unable to be replicated or the Professor was found to be p-hacking etc. but it was never brought up again.
Very informative, thank you for your work. Cheers!
My new favorite TH-cam channel! Why did it take so long to find you? Thanks for being brave enough to talk honestly and encourage critical thinking about subjects that matter.
I am way too late to this video but this was incredible. Very informative and very funny. This is fantastic content.
I have a biologist friend and he told me from the time at university, he found the studies in the psychology department shockingly amateurish in their methodology. He had no respect for the psychology department and it's people at all, finding them very unscientific.
In my graduation 9 out of the 13 highest gpas were psych majors.
I think a study measuring the effect of psychological experiments on a psychologists psychology should be undertaken
" Let's move on, it wasn't significant "
Good stuff.
in 6 months ill be doing my masters. Ive already floated some ideas about doing a replication masters but my handler is arguing that it will hinder my carrier possibilities. in other news ill be doing a replication masters in education.
What a wonderful video. Looking into neuroscience as a career path. I’m glad I watched this.
How incentives are structured is a major issue. As long as there is an economic/career incentive to publish, there will be manipulation.
I didn't even realise that making a hypothesis based on the findings is unethical until now, was thinking of doing that for my small research project (more of a passion project) because I thought it was acceptable but now I won't do that. Thank you letting me know.
I read this initially as you using data from elsewhere for your initial hypothesis and then gathering your own data , but I suppose you were talking about the way HARKing is used here.
I'll add that it's more that it seems to be when it's not disclosed and they pretend that they came up with the hypothesis first.
@@ChaoticNeutralMatt i see, that's why is wrong, thanks for clarifying
Problem with using statistics is that the underlying mathematical model must be good.
@@ALIEN_SENTIENT the testing is done with the t-distribution. Using that distribution the data must have certain properties.
My degree was in experimental psychology at a prestigious red brick university. The first big practical project was to replicate a fairly famous game-theory equation. Nobody got the predicted result. Most students forged their results to comply with the established algorithm: I stuck to my guns and instead proposed a very simple revision - introducing an almost self-evident variable to denote incentive - which then fit the data perfectly. Guess who got the lowest marks? When I protested I was simply told to get the results I was told to get. That wasn't an isolated incident either - it was systemic. Let's not pretend that our "scientists" can be trusted, it isn't true.
Am I the only one who expected there to be a hidden text or maybe context or something at 12:32 only to read "Media offline. Anyways, great video and an important topic, psychology is plagued the worst, but many things like publication bias and p hacking to straigh up making data up happens in every field and can affect actual human being if conclusion for clinical diagnosis and treatment and made based on that. Even the pressure on academics and the publish or perish mentality has more or less directly lead to loss of some great scientist, the statistics on suicide rate back it up.
Argh!!! I thought I got rid of all of that. I tell ya, Adobe was really getting on my nerves with all these rendering issues. Anyway, I agree with you 100%!
It's absolutely a good thing this all is being brought to light and continues to be, and I'm not just saying that because I didn't do well in my psych stats class. :P There is a large disconnect between research/lab and clinical work too.
Another awesome video!
Aw thanks!! That means a lot coming from you!
Most branches of 'scientific' psychology are complete bullshit. Personality/Social takes the cake though. Even when I was studying as an undergrad I was being sent to earn credits on PhD studies that involved 5 point questionnaires to harvest most of their data. I really enjoy the more analytic strains like Comparative and Developmental, but there's always room for debate there.
The desire for positive results even came down to the undergraduate level. They weren't interested in studies that had 'problems', it had to prove an effect. Most successful ones usually involved making people do tasks while under the effect of coffee. It didn't help that we had a media famous Psychology dept that got interest through stunts and shows.
Thank you for this in-depth discussion!
Current Psych Undergrad (and postmodern degenerate in my spare time) Undergraduate courses are really only beginning to address this. I’m taking a class specifically in techniques developed to address the replication crisis. Yet in basically all my other classes it seems like the department is moving in business as usual.
Another thing I’ve always wondered about the replication crisis is that psychology is affected by where you are in history. It could be that some of the psychological effects they described were cultural affects that shifted.
fantastic video!
You summed up my advanced research methods psychology class really well done
We learn just as much from not getting results, that it can eventually be what leads us to find what does produce results. This issue in our system is also causing a problem in cosmology, physics, psychology, astrophysicists, etc. I really appreciate this video because I absolutely love science and I hope we can find ways to improve the system we use to actually improve & evolve all different types of sciences.
I did a study in my research methods class and the p value was really tiny, something like 0.00002 or so (can't remember exactly but there were many zeroes). This invited much scrutiny from several professors in the psych department but after I gave them my data and they looked everything over, they agreed I had done it properly. I ended up being invited to present my paper at a large APA conference but I declined because I was only taking psych for something to do and wasn't serious about persuing it much further.
There's a very good reason for the saying (quote?) 'Lies, damn lies and statistics'. Certainly the data should be accessible for ALL published studies so that the results and statistical analysis can also be queried. I found it quite surprising when doing my research methods courses that not all peer reviewers review the datasets. We should also know who the reviewers are (some areas of science are quite cliquey) and their reports (and, perhaps, the reply) should be published. Psychology does get a bad rap for dodgy science (perhaps because of the type of people attracted to it?) but there are numerous cases in other sciences.
Great video though!
Being as a lot of attitudes and public policy are based on findings from psychological studies this is rather disturbing.
This is a systemic issue across all sciences, not just psychology. But it is worrisome, regardless. I side-eye everything now.
Great video!
My favorite story in this vein comes from the measurement of the electron charge - Feynman discusses this beautifully
The people that exposed this are heroes, and so are you! Extremely admirable to rank about a period of your life that you’re not necessarily proud of! We all have those times and more of us need to see a Rockstar that can admit to mistakes!
This video is a work of art, (and a valuable piece of science communication), congrats.
You just need a simple rating/indexing scheme. Somebody publishes and it has a replication counter = 0. Each time the study is replicated then the counter is incremented. Fairly quickly you have a database of results and veracity. This could carry forward into the citation system. Each citation in a new paper carries a designation as normal and the replication counter of the citation e.g. "as described by Smith [1] (32)" where Smith's study was replicated 32 times. A journal could then make the decision to publish based partly on the sum of citation replications in a manuscript thus prioritising replicability rather than absolute result.
As for the "paranormal" studies, the problem, for me, is the lack of scientific interdisciplinarity. If a psychologist concludes something unbelievable, his peers should demand a review from someone of another area, like a biologist, a neuroscientist, a physicist, etc. A psychologist should only publish his allegedly remarkable study, if he can purpose a multidisciplinary theory for his alleged results.
That is frankly absurd. Psychologists work within the rules and limitations accepted by their science, using the methodology and methods of analysis developed over decades of research. Bem's study passed all of these hurdles and (as a psychologist myself) I have no problem at all in accepting his results. Indeed, they have been confirmed by another discipline, sociology: a recent survey of paranormal experiences in the UK found that precognition was the most commonly reported experience, with around a quarter of respondents reporting it. This figure actually rises to a third of the population in the west of England. I may as well admit that I myself have had a variety of odd experiences, and so neither for methodological nor personal reasons could I fault this work. Indeed, I view criticisms of it to be based on personal belief ("there is no such thing") rather than any scientific foundation. It is actually alarming to me that so many people are actually shocked or horrified by Bem's results. Are they so out of touch with previous research into various psi phenomena that they are truly taken aback by these discoveries? It seems that we may indeed have to wait for the present generation of narrow minded and biased psychologists to die out before the new paradigm becomes established.
What the
Er... no.
Love this. I took a bio class and my hypothesis for my little experiment was wrong, so I wanted to just say that, but my prof had me basically change my hypothesis after the fact and act like I was trying to prove something else. That really surprised me, because I though it would be understandable to just say "I thought this would happen, but it didn't. My hypothesis was wrong." Looks like this stuff is a problem on a bigger scale. Also, pretty off topic, but was the esp study even true? Or was the point to show how bad data can be?
Simply changing the type of function (linear, exponential, power, etc.) can result in significant but also essentially random p-value changes, especially if the function has no reason to apply to the dataset. Math will do the work, whether reality actually fits the function or not.
Really appreciate your calm clarity.