Lecture 03

• Current estimates suggest that 50-60% of the published literature is not real.
• What are main 2 reasons why "A good walk spoiled" was an important podcast?

  1. Ship of Theseus 2. Great demo of having simple, interesting observation and going deeper into it (root of most social psychology)
• What is the Goal of science?

  to (slowly) accumulate evidence in support of (or refuting) theories about the world
• Where does "evidence" come from?

  the "evidence" comes from studies that people do, testing various part of theories
• How does replication relate to evidence

  for evidence to be considered evidence, important that labs can run the same experiments, and get the same results over and over again
• How do researchers investigate (3 "ingredients")

  1. Institutional Pressures - "publish or perish"
  2. Flashy & Significant effects needed to publish - publication bias
  3. Lots of ways to analyze data - P-hacking, intentional, and unintentional. *All contribute to "less replicable" science*
• P-Hacking is the process of manipulating datasets to find patterns that are not present in the original data to make sense of data
• Solutions to the P-hacking/replication issue

  1. Registered Reports
  2. Establishing best practices
  3. Pre-registration of hypothesis
  4. Open data, open code, methods
• Power Posing: posing with expansive posture will activate various hormonal processes (testosterone) and lead to more confident behaviour

  • Most popular TED talk
• Why is Power posing almost certainly not real?

  • numerous fails to replicate
  • problems with original studies
  • original first author says it was p-hacked (2nd author still defends)
• Ego-Depletion: The idea that we have a pool of limited mental resources that we can use to accomplish our goals
• What study found errors in Ego-Depletion

  A major study in 2016 carried out 2 dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence but author still defends
• Mental fatigue IS a real thing
• Concern with trying to confirm a stereotype (stereotype threat) is that it leads to actual confirmation of that stereotype
• Stereotype Threat: idea that you have a stereotype about the group that you're in & knowing about that stereotype makes you do worse
• "Science is self correcting": idea that weaker effects/things that don't replicate in any domaine, on't just get ignored by everyone - some still look into it