Quote:
Originally Posted by Abbaddabba
Does the general public care what an unknown PHD has written? When the results of the study start affecting people there're plenty of reasonable academics who'll scrutinize the work.
I disagree. There are a LOT of people who take Intro to Psych. It's required at most universities in the core requirements. The link above shows that many Intro to Psych books are deeply flawed.
For example, there are a lot of widespread beliefs in the general public about priming, yet over half the priming studies in the past 5 years did not replicate.
Even more importantly, much of this nonsense spills over into the clinical fields, where therapists are using techniques that do not replicate under scrutiny.
Most reasonable academics will NOT scrutinize the works. Here is why:
1) Most journals will not publish replication studies. In fact, the replication project started by Hal Pashler has not done very well because the researchers don't get anything out of it (e.g. publications).
2) Many are afraid of offending their colleagues and stay away from it. Some statisticians like Uri Simonsohn don't care, but there are few like him.
3) It's hard to replicate a study and often takes a lot of time and money that researchers don't have. Granting agencies won't fund this. Methods section in journal articles are not detailed enough to do the replication without getting additional info from the authors. The original authors usually won't play along bc they know they're under attack. Raw data gets "lost".