I've often said I think it would be a fair trade to swap a three-day waiting period on purchasing handguns if we required a three-day waiting period for science articles in the New York Times along with it.
Nothing makes that case better than the Times and its loving production of articles based on research by Stapel claiming that advertising works by making women feel worse about themselves and that conservative politics causes hypocrisy, along with neatness causing racism. Don't recall those articles here? Of course not, other than making fun of Stapel long before it was cool, along with Satoshi Kanazawa and too many others to count in the World of Woo.
Yet it is cool now, and Weekly Standard writer Andrew Ferguson is on the case:
The silliness of social psychology doesn’t lie in its questionable research practices but in the research practices that no one thinks to question. The most common working premise of social-psychology research is far-fetched all by itself: The behavior of a statistically insignificant, self-selected number of college students or high schoolers filling out questionnaires and role-playing in a psych lab can reveal scientifically valid truths about human behavior.
We've blasted these studies since 2006 yet a surprising number of people on psychology continue to endorse them, with the tepid defense being 'we're not the only ones with frauds', which isn't really all that great.
As I have said before, it is a very good thing that it is young researchers in the field blowing the whistle on older researchers who got by exploiting the system in a discipline where there is virtually no accountability. Good thing we are, because we know the New York Times journalists aren't going to ask the awkward questions they should be asking.
