Do you know what really grinds my gears?
Bad Science.
Do you know what grinds my gears even more?
Bad Science by qualified scientists
You know what grinds my gears to the point of a thermonuclear explosion?
Bad science by qualified scientists that ends up being reported by the mainstream media as fact.
How hard could it possibly be to form a hypothesis, choose a method to test that hypothesis, collect data on said hypothesis and report the results on it in an honest manner?
Apparently, it can get quite tough for quite a lot of us. Especially for psychologists.
See, we psychologists have this infatuation with numbers. Much like a student in class 10th, we feel that numbers are what define us. If we don’t get the right numbers, our parents will never love us.
Well, sorry to break your bubble Dhruv but your parents don’t love you; irrespective of whether you get the right numbers or not. It is about time you grew out of this delusion and started trying to be an actually good son.
My frustration this week comes courtesy of an article I chanced upon by The Swaddle which claimed, “Scientists have found the latest beauty secret” along with an image that read “How a ‘Mind-Altering’ Parasite Makes People Seem More Sexually Appealing”
I was immediately skeptical about what this meant or how the researchers managed to find this out. I found the original research paper which this article was inspired by and lets just say, by the time I got to the end of it, my gears were fully grinding.
Here is the full table of results comparing the results of people infected with Toxoplasma and those without it.
You can see a lot of variables and a lot of numbers which are not our main concern. I simply need you to look at the column with the markings. Each red mark means there was no significant difference between the two groups. It might as well have been a result of pure chance. Unsurprisingly, most of the variables have red marks but that is not what ended up in the abstract of this particular research.
Conveniently, the abstract, which is supposed to be a summary of the whole research failed to mention all the things where no result was found. The writer who wrote the article didn’t bother to check the details either and thus we were left with an article with at least 2800 interactions on Instagram and an even wider reach.
It is hard to get people to take psychology seriously, it’s harder when the field is going through a replication crisis of its own, and scientific communication of such low standards makes it nearly impossible.
I can only grind my gears because anything else is simply too infuriating.
Special thanks to Sonal, an avid reader of the newsletter who led me to this article. My gears would have remained at peace if it was not for you 🤗🤗
And that is it for this week! As you can see I have been trying to shorten my articles based on the feedback I got from some readers. Would you like to see something else? You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out the bonus article I wrote in midweek on the price that shoddy social science can have in the aftermath of the tragic Buffalo Mass Shooting.