An alarming amount of research is flawed Brett Ryder
LISTENING to When I’m Sixty-Four by The Beatles can make you younger. This miraculous effect, dubbed “chronological rejuvenation”, was revealed in the journal Psychological Science in 2011. It wasn’t a hoax, but you’d be right to be suspicious. The aim was to , simply by picking and choosing methods and data in ways that researchers do every day.
The paper caused a stir among psychologists, and has become the most cited in the journal’s history. The following year, Nobel prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman stoked the fire with an open email to social psychologists warning of a “train wreck” if they didn’t clean up their act. But things only came to a head last year with the . It described a major effort to replicate 100 psychology experiments published in top journals. The success rate was little more than a third. People began to talk of a “crisis” in psychology.
In fact, the problem extends far beyond psychology – dubious results are alarmingly common in many fields of science. Worryingly, they seem to be especially shaky in areas that have a direct bearing on human well-being – the science underpinning everyday political, economic and healthcare decisions. No wonder the whistle-blowers are urgently trying to investigate why it’s happening, how big the problem is and what can be done to fix it. In doing so, they are highlighting flaws in the way we all think, and exposing cracks in the culture of science.
Science is often thought…
