Authority figures in psychology spread more happy talk, still don’t get the point that much of the published, celebrated, and publicized work in their field is no good (Part 2)

Part 1 was here.

And here’s Part 2. Jordan Anaya reports:

Uli Schimmack posted this on facebook and twitter.

I [Anaya] was annoyed to see that it mentions “a handful” of unreliable findings, and points the finger at fraud as the cause. But then I was shocked to see the 85% number for the Many Labs project. I’m not that familiar with the project, and I know there is debate on how to calculate a successful replication, but they got that number from none other than the “the replication rate in psychology is quite high—indeed, it is statistically indistinguishable from 100%” people, as Sanjay Srivastava discusses here.

Schimmack identifies the above screenshot as being from Myers and Twenge (2018); I assume it’s this book, which has the following blurb:

Connecting Social Psychology to the world around us. Social Psychology introduces students to the science of us: our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a changing world. Students learn to think critically about everyday behaviors and gain an appreciation for the world around us, regardless of background or major.

But according to Schimmack, there’s “no mention of a replication failure in the entire textbook.” That’s fine—it’s not necessarily the job of an intro textbook to talk about ideas that didn’t work out—but then why mention replications in the first place? And why try to minimize it by talking about “a handful of unreliable findings”? A handful, huh? Who talks like that. This is a “Politics and the English Language” situation, where sloppy language serves sloppy thinking and bad practice.

Also, to connect replication failures to “fraud” is just horrible, as it’s consistent with two wrong messages: (a) that to point out a failed replication is to accuse someone of fraud, and (b) that, conversely, honest researchers can’t have replication failures. As I’ve written a few zillion times, honesty and transparency are not enuf. As I wrote here, it’s a mistake to focus on “p-hacking” and bad behavior rather than the larger problem of researchers expecting routine discovery.

So, the blurb for the textbook says that students learn to think critically about everyday behaviors—but they won’t learn to think critically about published research in the field of psychology.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying the authors of this textbook are bad people. My guess is they just want to believe the best about their field of research, and enough confused people have squirted enough ink into the water to confuse them into thinking that the number of unreliable findings really might be just “a handful,” that 85% of experiments in that study replicated, that the replication rate in psychology is statistically indistinguishable from 100%, that elections are determined by shark attacks and college football games, that single women were 20 percentage points more likely to support Barack Obama during certain times of the month, that elderly-priming words make you walk slower, that Cornell students have ESP, etc etc etc. There are lots of confused people out there, not sure where to turn, so it makes sense that some textbook writers will go for the most comforting possible story. I get it. They’re not trying to mislead the next generation of students; they’re just doing their best.

There are no bad guys here.

Let’s just hope 2019 goes a little better.

A good start would be for the authors of this book to send a public note to Uli Schimmack thanking them for pointing out their error, and then replacing that paragraph with something more accurate in their next printing. They could also write a short article for Perspectives on Psychological Science on how they got confused on this point, as this could be instructive for other teachers of psychology. They don’t have to do this. They can do whatever they want. But this is my suggestion how they could get 2019 off to a good start, in one small way.