Ed Yong
speaker
15 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2013
last heard May 2013
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
In the original study, volunteers saw a set of scrambled words and they had to create a sentence from them.
Some of the words related to being old.
The volunteers weren't consciously aware of that fact.
According to the study, those who saw those words relating to old age, after they left the room where they did the test, then walked more slowly down a corridor.
So those words related to old age primed their behaviour and made them walk more slowly after they left that testing room.
Now, this attempt to replicate that study made a couple of small changes, but notably it found that the people who saw those old age words did not, in fact, walk more slowly down a corridor.
They only did so if the experimenters themselves expected them to do so.
One of the main issues in psychology at the moment is what's known as questionable research practices.
These are fairly common ways of basically massaging data, not fabricating it, in order to get positive results.
So it might be things like carrying on your analysis until such point as you see significant results and then stopping.
or analysing lots of different variables together until you find one that gives you a significant result and then only reporting that.
Absolutely.
They're symptomatic of the pressure to publish or perish, the incentives that scientists have to produce a lot of papers in high-impact journals that produce novel and interesting findings.
And that is the root of the problem.
What is good for science is not necessarily what is good for individual scientists.
Showing 1–15 of 15