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Rise-Of-Clueless-Dept.
Over the past few years, social psychologists have come under fire for publishing work based on falsified and non-reproducible evidence. And now one social psychologist has published an awe-inspiringly clueless rant about this situation that will leave you smashing your face into your desk.
At issue in this essay by Harvard's Jason Mitchell is the specific accusation, leveled against many social psychologists, that their results cannot be reproduced. Though the idea of reproducibility is essential to the scientific process indeed, some would argue the very definition of it [PDF]. Mitchell believes that the emphasis on reproducibility is nothing more than "hand-wringing ( http://io9.com/the-rise-of-the-evolutionary-psychology-douchebag-757550990 )".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TGV on Wednesday July 09 2014, @01:21PM
I disagree. It is a cause to be upset. For some time now, experimenters and statisticians from other areas in psychology have been fighting with people like Mitchell. There is so much nonsense out there: you do more X when you take a warm shower, your intuition is better than your rational judgement, you're better at thinking out of the box when there is a box on the table, and the list goes on. They make so many errors in their assumptions, experiments and analysis, that it is quite appalling to get another "you can't reproduce it properly and we're not going to acknowledge our errors. Nanananana."