Thursday, November 17, 2011

Fudging

There are lies, there are damn lies, and there is psychological science:
In a forthcoming paper, also to appear in Psychological Science, Leslie K. John, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and two co-authors report that about a third of the 2,000 academic psychologists they surveyed admit to questionable research practices. Those don't include outright fraud, but rather such practices as stopping the collection of data when a desired result is found, or omitting from the final paper some of the variables tested.
And this doesn't even include the fact that most psychological studies involve some kind of totally unreliable self-reporting by the subjects. Not a real major point here, just something to remember.

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