*Patreon Preview* Decoding Academia #2: False Positive Psychology
Decoding the Gurus
Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2021
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The New Year is upon us and the gurologists thought they should contribute to the holiday cheer in the only way they can... releasing a rambling podcast about academic minutiae!
This is not a new guru episode, instead it is a preview of our Patreon bonus series 'Decoding Academia' in which we discuss research that has influenced us & we think is relevant for understanding the gurus (or in this case approaching research critically).
The paper in question is a classic social psychology paper that slightly pre-empted the Replication Crisis with very timely warnings about lax methodological standards. The paper is titled 'False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant' and is by Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn (2011).
If you want to read the paper yourself it can be freely accessed here.
It introduces the concept of 'Researcher Degrees of Freedom' and also statistically *proves* that listening to certain music can make you physically younger.
How? Join us and find out!
Finally... just a quick note to say Happy New Year from Chris & Matt! We will be back early next year with our Robert Wright episode and many gurus thereafter.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're going to. Well, come everybody, another episode of Decoding Academia where Chris and I at the moment, anyway, |
| 0:31.0 | are taking turns in picking research articles that we enjoy and |
| 0:35.6 | talking about it. If you're watching this on YouTube you'll see that Chris has a very nice stack |
| 0:39.6 | of academically books behind him. There's nothing behind me because my brother's at his house at the moment. |
| 0:47.3 | He only has one working USB port which is being used for my microphone so I cannot use the keyboard to search for an image. |
| 0:54.0 | It's because the real knowledge is all up there. |
| 0:58.2 | You don't need any zoom background. |
| 1:00.4 | It's, yeah, there's no virtue signaling for you Chris. What what have you got for us today? You've got something I've got something I've got something more up to date after your ancient publication from the 1980s. I'm taking us back just 10 years ago a decade ago now |
| 1:16.9 | though to 2011 and a paper that has proved extremely influential cited thousands of times called false positive |
| 1:27.3 | psychology. |
| 1:28.3 | Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant by Joseph Simmons, |
| 1:37.2 | Leaf Nelson and Uri Simonson. |
| 1:40.9 | Simonson. |
| 1:41.9 | Now Chris, we had a bit of confusion about which was the right article for me to read and if you're a call you recommend it. |
| 1:50.0 | Did we? We, we in inverted Combes did because you told me that there was an article and you gave me the rough title and you told me the author was Iannadis. |
| 2:02.0 | Oh yeah, right. |
| 2:04.0 | I read a book called, I read an article called Why Most Published Research Findings are |
| 2:07.8 | False, very similar to what you said by John Ianadis. |
| 2:11.6 | And in fact, the article that you're a community isn't |
| 2:15.0 | by O'Donus is by Simmons, Nelson and Simonson. So that would explain why I read |
| 2:20.3 | the wrong article Chris. I was I just realized that as well well they're very similar |
| 2:24.5 | they're very similar in tone and I I am this the so what was the title of his one why |
... |
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