"... the peril of a field that relies too heavily on the notion that if something is statistically likely, it can be counted on"
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-crisis-in-social-psychology-that-isnt.html
MAY 1, 2013
THE CRISIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY THAT ISN’T
According to the headlines, social psychology has had a terrible year—and, at any rate, a bad week. The New York Times Magazine devoted nearly seven thousand words to Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who committed fraud in at least fifty-four scientific papers, while Nature just published a report about another controversy, questioning whether some well-known “social-priming” results from the social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis are replicable. Dijksterhuis famously found that thinking about a professor before taking an exam improves your performance, while thinking about a soccer ruffian makes you do worse. Although nobody doubts that Dijksterhuis ran the experiment that he says he did, it may be that his finding is either weak, or simply wrong—perhaps the peril of a field that relies too heavily on the notion that if something is statistically likely, it can be counted on.
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