Why you can't trust the results of psychological research

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The phrase "Scientists have proven that …" is automatically associated with information that can be trusted. We read the article, we believe, we take new knowledge into service. But we should be careful and include an internal critic every time, because not all psychological research is trustworthy.

Recently, many publications have published the results of a study according to which the male and female brains are indistinguishable, and all speculations about this have been declared unfounded. Now it’s even somehow ashamed to give the book “Men from Mars, Women from Venus”, otherwise they will say that you are not interested in the latest achievements of science.

You really shouldn't throw your gift in the trash can. The book is good. But the peremptory nature of scientists and the results of their work is not as unambiguous as it might seem. Less than 24 hours after the publication of the study on the identity of the brains of men and women, as scientists were able to refute it and said: the female brain ages more slowly than the male.

Then we learned about the results of yet another new psychological experiment. This time, scientists decided to explore the field of medicine. They conducted a survey of those patients who most often go to doctors. It turned out that constant visits to the clinic for any reason cultivate in a person confidence in his own knowledge. He becomes aggressive and puts pressure on the attending physician to prescribe stronger and more effective drugs, such as antibiotics. The study says that nine out of ten doctors admit that they succumb to the influence of such assertive patients, and this problem needs to be studied further.

At about the same time as the above report was published, the results of other work appeared in the media. They showed that more than half of British women cannot discuss sex and sexual health with their doctor because they are embarrassed to do so. Young girls are reluctant to visit a doctor, can hardly describe the symptoms or ask questions about the genitals. And 25% of women admitted that it is very difficult for them to just find the right words in order to name parts of their body to the doctor.

What proportion of these women are included in the list of assertive patients, and how do the results of the first study correlate with the second?

All these paradoxes and discrepancies would be funny if it were not for the fact that we are literally surrounded by the headlines "Scientists have proven that …" and "Research results speak about …". The media love psychologists and their statements. For example, The Times regularly publishes such articles, once submitting five articles on this topic at once in one day. The publication talked about how the appearance of best friends affects our personal life; the development of clinical depression in those who are engaged in boring work; how children try to treat depression on their own with advice on the internet; that people feel lonelier in the workplace than on vacation; and how parents are capable of cheating in order for their child to go to a good school. And already the next week, The Sunday Times published a huge amount of material telling about our psychological life and the changes in it.

This new category of news is not so bad and has recently become one of the most popular and relevant news. But we need to call on all our sanity to help us correctly interpret the results of all these studies. The fact is that psychological experiments differ not only in the sphere of interest, but also in the quality of the work performed. Some of them are conducted by professional psychologists, some by sociological organizations, and some by charities. Also, government or commercial organizations are often involved in research. Therefore, such surveys cannot be considered objective, their methodology and coverage should at least arouse your suspicion.

How many people took part in the study? How comprehensive was the statistical analysis? Is the overall concept well thought out?

How you answer these questions determines the consistency of the study and its results.

But that's not all. The credibility or unreliability of psychological research has been attacked even more forcefully than a simple test of objectivity and correct methodology. Doubts were first raised in 2013 when John Ionnidis, an epistemologist at Stanford Medical School, published his famous work. It was devoted to neuroscience, which is considered to be a rigid form of psychology. It is in this area of science that functional MRI is widely used as a way to record the work of the brain. Despite the powerful medical tools, the professor considers the results of neurological research unreliable and describes the phenomenon of voodoo correlation. This term refers to a misinterpretation of the relationship between brain activity and human behavior.

Voodoo correlation can occur due to poor use of functional MRI or poor performance with the received data. Testing 53 studies for the presence of this voodoo correlation showed that half of them are unreliable, and the conclusions contain serious flaws. Another analysis showed that 42% of the 134 published papers contained methodological errors.

There is another problem that few people remember. Most psychological research is almost impossible to replicate to get the same result. In order to prove the existence of such a phenomenon, a large-scale experiment was carried out, in which 270 scientists from all over the world took part. As part of the project, scientists tried to repeat more than a hundred psychological experiments, the results of which were previously published in three major scientific journals:

• Psychological Science;
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology;
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

In other words, the purpose of this work was to check those studies that at one time were awarded publication in the most famous and respected publications.

The results were disappointing. First, it turned out that the predicted effect in practice was, on average, half as much. For example, if a new teaching methodology promised to improve the educational process by 12%, in practice only 6% of progress was obtained. Second, initial studies rated 97% of the findings as statistically significant. But a repeated experiment showed that only 36% of the information received can be used for work. In addition, many psychological studies have not been reproduced at all, any attempt ended in failure.

What does this mean? We have a huge appetite and want to know more about our emotional, social and intellectual life. We are interested in ourselves as we are in no one or anything else. But one phrase "Scientists have proved that the brain of a woman is identical to the brain of a man" is not enough for you to relax and accept this fact on faith.

Include an inner critic! The only thing we can be sure of is that a woman's brain and a man's brain must be equally skeptical.