Is Psychology a science 2 (practice) Flashcards
what are the 7 deadly sins in Psychology?
- Bias.
- Internment.
- Unreliability.
- Corruptability.
- Data hoarding.
- Bean-counting.
- Hidden flexibility
what is internement?
publishing data and papers in places not everyone can access it. e.g. behind a paywall
what is bean-counting?
meaningless data processing until you find a result you want?
what is hidden flexibility?
when there are extra steps to your procedure that isn’t clear so people may not replicate the study
what is bias?
A cognitive style which predisposes you towards particular patterns of behaviour.
what are the 4 types of bias?
- Confirmation bias = looking for things you already know to be true, ignore everything else
- Hindsight bias (HARKing) = hypothesising after the study has been done
- Publication bias = only publishing significant results in journals
- Novelty bias = publishing new results that haven’t been found before and not replicated to keep the novelty
what is error?
A mistake or incorrect inference which leads to incorrect findings
what are some errors?
- low powered studies = your test only has a small chance of detecting a true effect or that the results are likely to be distorted by random and systematic error
- poor statistical reasoning = too many psychologists don’t understand statistics or not as well as they should
- nonsense maths effect
- omission of details / typos = developmental psychology, sitting infants down and getting attention is hard
- what does ‘ p = 0.05’ actually represent - generally regarded as the chance of finding the phenomena in psychology however is different in science
- failures to confirm, discofirm, revise ad
what is nonsense maths effect?
a nonsense equation that made no sense was added to an abstract, and one was left without the question. People preferred the one with the equation and thought it was more correct/scientific despite the fact the equation was irrelevant
what is spin?
Reframing the issue in order to draw attention to less insalubrious elements.
what are some examples of spin?
- Researcher flexibility
- Multiple comparisons
- P-hacking
- Double-dipping
QRPs: Questionable Research Practices
what is treachery?
violation of faith; betrayal of trust; treason
what is peer review?
- Journal recommendations for peer-reviewers tend to emphasise novelty and subjective opinions.
-To comment upon the precision, conciseness & typographical integrity of the writing. - To consider it a professional honour to perform peer-review.
- To comment on the likelihood of academic fraud (!).
- To comment on novelty of the work.
Autism and the MMR vaccine
- Misrepresented / altered data for 12 patients.
- Falsely claimed Autism symptoms first occurred after MMR vaccine.
- Ignored lack of autism diagnosis.
- Concealed his involvement in a court case suing vaccine manufacturers.
- Concealed his financial interests in an alternative vaccine.
solutions to these errors, biases etc.
- Critique & de-bunking.
- Systematic review.
- Statistical reform.
- Pre-registration.
- Meta-analysis.
- Open Science.
- Commentary.
- Replication.
- Retraction.
- Teaching.
