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When a New Study Debunks Science, Don't Ignore It

BeyondTheNow

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When a New Study Debunks Science, Don't Ignore It


A recent fracas over a psychology experiment helps illustrate how social science is broken -- and how to fix it.

...In 2008, Science, one of the top scientific journals, published a paper by a group of psychologists that claimed to find biological differences between liberals and conservatives...Fast forward a decade, though, and the claim is unraveling. In a working paper published this month, another team of psychologists attempted to repeat the experiment, and also conducted other similar experiments. They failed to find any evidence linking physical-threat perception with political ideology. But when they tried to publish their paper, Science desk-rejected it -- that is, the editors refused to even send the paper out for peer review, claiming that the replication study simply wasn’t noteworthy enough to be published in a top journal. Meanwhile, another team of researchers also recently tried to replicate the original study, and failed. So even though at this point the evidence proving a biological basis for liberalism and conservatism seems to have been invalidated, it’s unclear whether this fact will make it into the public conversation...

I fail to see why there would be any objection to the updated findings being published. If the original study was science/news-worthy enough to publish, then just as any other subject study, any related legitimate findings, research, experiments etc that are gathered as time progresses, whether in support or against the original, should be brought forward equally. That’s how knowledge and awareness increases, right?

More at link:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/scientific-credibility-harmed-when-experiments-fail-to-replicate
 
BeyondTheNow said:
When a New Study Debunks Science, Don't Ignore It


A recent fracas over a psychology experiment helps illustrate how social science is broken -- and how to fix it.

I fail to see why there would be any objection to the updated findings being published. If the original study was science/news-worthy enough to publish, then just as any other subject study, any related legitimate findings, research, experiments etc that are gathered as time progresses, whether in support or against the original, should be brought forward equally. That’s how knowledge and awareness increases, right?

The problem is that social sciences and social-psychology have a higher proportion of liberal rather than conservative leaning types.  How much of their own biases influence their studies or acceptance of said studies? 

More at link:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/scientific-credibility-harmed-when-experiments-fail-to-replicate
 
The issue isn't that social science is broken.  This whole thing is because a journal "Science" has policies where are counter to what the researchers believe they should be. Science only publishes things that it believes lead to it remaining one of the top (if not top) scientific journals in the world (I prefer Nature as the top but I'm a biased biology major from way back...).  Publishing a paper that covers a topic it already covered is not something Science does, for good or for ill.  Ego thing, reputation thing, standards thing, whatever the reason Science doesn't really do that. Probably for the same reasons newspapers don't publish retractions with the same placement as their original stories.  No such thing as a front page retraction.

There are a few issues here that are not related to the journal as well, as I've read other articles on what started with particular debate:
-media coverage of scientific research is essentially clickbait, its generally garbage, and they only look at journals like Science
-scientific journals overall don't like to publish papers that have no results, or repeats of past experiments.  They like new things or new twists on old ideas. There is no such thing as a journal of no results (though there probably should be one) which is the thrust of this article
-the authors of the refutation paper are trying to make this a political thing when it isn't, I suspect it's about 40% sour grapes and 40% concern with the journal and 20% ego regarding their own research.
 
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