PS122 History of Psych Flashcards
Plato
Rationalism - Senses can be deceiving.Thus they should not be trusted.
People should relyonlogicinstead
Allegory of the Cave
Prisoners in a cave can only see shadows on a wall
These shadows become their reality
Only once they are allowed to leave the cave can they see ‘real’ objects
Cave is a parable of the human condition
Soul imprisoned in body and forced to look at imperfect copies of objects. “Forms” are the only true (perfect) example
Empiricism
Contrasts with Rationalism. Emphasises role of experience. Gains information through sensory perception and observation.
Aristotle (384-422 BC)
He gained his knowledge from observation, believed that observation and analysis are reliable.
Hence he was an empiricist
However, he did no experimentation. Studied living things and analysed the nature of causes. He defined the ‘soul’ as that which animates and gives form to matter.
Rene Descartes
Born in 1956. Rationalist. I think therefore I am.
Mind-body Dualism
He (Descartes) made an ontological distinction:
Mind (res cogitans) and Matter (res extensa) are fundamentally different things.
Matter occupies space, but doesn’t think.
Mind thinks, but doesn’t occupy space
The human mind is uniquely reflexive, linguistic and rational.
John Locke
KEY THEMES
How do we acquire knowledge?
Nature vs. Nurture
We do not have innate ideas. ‘Tabula Rasa’ Life is a blank slate.
Perception vs. Reality
This model was proposed by John Locke
Primary Qualities - Objective Physical World (Matter, Energy and Motion)
Secondary Qualities - Subjective mental life (Intentions, Ideas and feelings)
Meaning is assigned by secondaery qualtities
David Hume
Born 1711 one of the central figures of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.
But argued that reason is the slave of passions.
We argue from our convictions, not to them
One of his aims was to answer the question: “What do we really know from experience?”
Experienceactually provides fewergrounds for beliefthan weconventionally assume.
“No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inferencethat all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan issufficient to refute that conclusion.”
Problem of falsifiability
Repeated instances do not justify ontological induction.
Correlation is not causation
Moreover, this reasoning applies to what we take to be causes.
Flames have has so often been accompanied by the experience of heatthat we take them to be the cause of heat.
But there is nonecessaryreason to do so, it is merely a habitual belief.
Cause itselfis not perceivable.
Is the “Mind of Man” no more than a mechanism?
Modern Psychology emerged between1850 - 1900
Principles of materialism and mechanism expressed the spirit of Modernism.
Around 1840, Helmholtz, Brücke and other German scientists signed an “anti-vitalism” (vitalism is the rejection that life is sustained through biology) oath:
“No other forces other than the common physical-chemical ones are active with the organism”
How do we quantify the psychological processes we are interested in?
- Psychometrics: Intelligence testing
- Psychophysics: perception and sensation
- Structuralism and consciousness
Psychometrics measures things like:
Intelligence
Personality
Aptitudes for specific skills or occupations
Nature or degree of mental illness
Educational problems
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Cousin of Darwin
Born in Birmingham
Made first weather maps
Classified fingerprints
Great statistical contribution to Psychology
Galton suggested Intelligence could also form a normal distribution. Developed the “standard deviation”. Plotted scores from top 100 candidates at Cambridge. Published Hereditary Genius (1869)
Individual differences in intelligence must be innate!
Intelligence runs in families
E.g. Brontës in literature; Bachs in music
Galton board
TheGalton board, orbean machine, is a device invented by SirFrancis Galton to demonstrate that with sufficient sample size thebinomial distributionapproximates anormal distribution. Among its applications, it afforded insight intoregression to the mean
Inheritance of Eminence
Classified families as ‘eminent’ (famous, respected or important) not
For the most eminent family member:
31% of fathers were eminent
27% of brothers were eminent
48% of sons were eminent
5-8% of grandfathers, grandsons, uncles and nephews were eminent
Closer the kinship, the greater the likelihood of eminence (gene sharing)
First attempt to account for heritability of psychological characteristics
BUT: Closer the relative, the more likely to share the environment
Eugenics
Galton believed that, because horses can be bred with certain characteristics, so could humans
“produce a highly gifted race of men during several consecutive generations”
Eugenics - Improving the human race by selective breeding
Set up AnthropometricLab
(Eugenics generallyabandoned after early20thcentury)
Binet intelligence scales
Alfred Binet was a French doctor (1857-1911), influenced by Galton and Darwin
In 1905 joined a government commission to identify school children with “mental handicap”
Wanted to create a fair system of testing intelligence testing, not based on previous education experience
Used large banks of tests, including word associations, drawing, and digit span
Realised that age needed to be considered!!
First intelligence test
Binet and Simon constructed first usable test of intelligence (1905)
Comprised of 30 separate items with increasing difficulty
E.G. Follow lighted match with eyes (attention)
What is difference between paper and cardboard?
Construct a sentence with ‘Paris’, ‘river’, ‘fortune’
Intelligent Quotient
German psychologist William Stern introduced Intelligence Quotient in 1912:
IQ = mental age/ x 100
chronological age
E.g. Child of 10 who has a mental age of 12 would have an IQ of 120 (12/10*100)
Higher IQ = superior
Intelligence testing today
Mental testing and IQ is still in common use, but much developed
Tests often updated every few years
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children(WISC).
Galton’s and Binet’s ideas very influential and have had a major impact on modern psychology
Franz Joseph Gall
1758-1828
Found nerve fibres passing from one side to the other of the brain (commissures)
Comparative anatomist – compared brains
In general, the larger the brain the more advanced the mental functions
(Mostly accurate except in adult human population)
Phrenology
Gall believed that certain ‘faculties’ were based in specific parts of the brain…
In some ways true: motor area, visual area, language, executive control etc.
Bumps and indentations onsurface of the skull reflect thesize of “phrenological organs” in the brain
Ultimately discredited but the initial ideas were based on empirical observations
There were flaws in the logic though
Psychophysics
Returning to our main problem: how do we measure the mind scientifically
Physics was the natural model for early psychology.
Hence, Psycho-physics, the objective investigation of subjective experience.
Interested in sensation and perception
E.H Weber
1795-1878
Pioneered methods for measuring the sensitivity of the senses. Especially looked at thresholds
Conscious sensations of a stimuli may not reflect reality.
One way of constraining the problem of subjectivity is to measure thresholds.
Absolute Thresholds are the smallest quantities that give any sensation at all.
level of stimulus intensity at which stimulus can no longer be detected
Relative thresholds (Just noticeable difference ) are the smallest quantitative change that is noticeable.
minimum difference (e.g. brightness) between two items to be able to tell them apart
Just Noticeable Differences
Relative thresholds are also known as “Just Noticeable Differences” - JND’s.
The Weber - Fechner Law states that JND’s are a constant proportion of the absolute intensity.
It was hoped that psychophysics would steadily discover all such laws.
Hermann Von Helmholtz
1821-1894
One of the greatest 19th Century Physiologists. Adopted a ‘Doctrine of
Mechanism’ (opposed to vitalism)
Rate of neural conduction:
Initially used a frogs leg
Stimulating the nerve in the leg would cause the foot to twitch
Stimulated different distances from the foot and measured time taken for foot to twitch
Calculated the Neural conduction = 25 meters per second
Helmholtz: Trichomatic theory
Groundbreaking work on colour perception
Noted only 3 colour receptors (cones – RGB)
But can see many different hues
Hues arise from a mix of cones excited to different degrees
Helmholtz: Unconscious inference
Realised that image on the retina may not accurately reflect the external world
E.g. Blind spot – brain ‘fills’ in this area
Sometimes the brain’s perceptions contradict the raw sensations
Visual illusions
Derive the most probable explanation (unconscious inference)
Based on prior visual learning experience
Gestalt Psychology
Psychophysics revealed a lot about the senses,
but not much about how sensations become perception.
Gestalt psychology - ‘A whole is more than it’s parts’.
Principles
emergence
reification
multistability
invariance
Wundt
Considered the founder of experimental psychology
Set up first experimental psychology lab at Leipzig, Germany (1879)
Supervised 186 PhDs including Titchener, William James, Cattell
Cultural psychology
10 volume work on cultural psychology
Religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, customs
Not only shaped by senastion/ perception, but by culture.
Very interested in language – verbal communication of idea one wants to say.
Wundt and Structuralism
Wondered whether complex mental experience could be broken down into simple processes: building blocks
Influenced by physicists and chemists breaking down molecules into atoms (e.g. water into hydrogen and oxygen)
Method: Systematic introspection
Introspection
There is external observation and internal observation (inside own mind)
Wundt described psychology as the ‘science of conscious experience’
Therefore the best method is to observe the conscious experience
However, only the person having the experience can observe it…
Thus he used introspection
Observation: Observer must pay close attention to the stimulus (used observers trained in introspection)
Experimental control: Experiment creates external conditions that are stable across time and participants
Observer must report the elements of consciousness (e.g. duration of a stimulus, size etc.)
Wundt: Problems for introspection
Wundt noted that introspective reports were unverifiable
Memory can often play tricks with recollection of psychological states
As a result higher mental processes will be too complex to study
Criticisms of Introspection (1)
Participants may not agree on their introspections
Problem of validity: Who was right?
As it’s subjective, repeating the study will not help
Wundt acknowledges this problem but thought that further training could help
Criticisms of Introspection (2)
Introspection could also be classified as ‘retrospection’..
.. depending on the time between the stimulus and report
Examining an experience in an introspective manner may alter it
(e.g. introspecting on anger may cause the anger to subside)
Criticisms of Introspection (3)
Imageless thoughts
In problem solving often cannot report on their introspections. The solution ‘just appears’
Implies that many psychological processes are not available for introspective access
William James
First to teach psychology courses: Harvard 1875
“ the stream of consciousness”
Consciousness is not a thing, but a process.
Unlike Wundt, James did not believe in breaking down experiences.
Pragmatism – “true beliefs” are those the believer finds useful.
Functionalism
Phillipe Pinel
Pioneer in humane treatment of patients, classification of disorders.
Roots of Freudian Theory
After work with Charcot, Fliess and Breuer, Freud became convinced that mental illness was not just physiological and that psychological treatment could be effective.
Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ was the seed for psychoanalysis.
Freud’s clinical work suggested that many neurotic symptoms could be traced to early traumas, unconscious in adult life, that affected the development of personality.
He abandoned an early theory of ‘childhood seduction’,
but he retained the idea that sexuality was a part of early parent-child relations.
Who was the first patient treated by the talking cute?
Anna O - A patient with Hysteria
Psychodynamic Perspective
Freud believed psychology influences caused disorders
Wanted to see what these psychological influences were
Psychoanalysis Treatment Process:
Patients revealed painful, embarrassing thoughts in the unconscious (through talking, free association).
Once these memories were retrieved and released… the patients then would feel better
Conscious, preconcious and unconscious
Conscious - what you are currently aware of
Preconscious - info not in conscious but is able to be retrieved when needed
Unconscious - Massive amount hidden from view
Id
Primitive, unconscious portion of the personality
Houses the most basic drives and stores repressed memories
“Pleasure Principle”
Superego
Mind’s storehouse of values, moral attitudes learned from parents and society, same as common notion of conscience
Ego
Conscious, rational part of personality
Charged with keeping peace between superego and id
Eros and Thanatos
Eros and Thanatos
(Love and death)
Eros drives us toward life and procreation
Thanatos drives us to risk-seeking
Death instinct - people have an innate attraction to death and destruction e.g watching true crime
Freudian slips
“Slip of the Tongue”
not something you meant to say, but was brought out through your unconscious thought
Latent content of dreams
Symbolic meaning of dream images, what your unconscious mind is thinking
Hypnotherapy
Franz Anton Mesmer
“mesmerism”
Jean-Martin Charcot
Neurologist who used hypnosis on patients
Joseph Breuer
Could reduce severity of symptoms
Free Association
Developed by Carl Jung - write a word down and then create lines to other words associated with this
How does the ego negotiate between the id and the superego?
These clashes are called intrapsychic or psychodynamic conflicts.
Psychic energy cannot be destroyed, only redistributed.
This process can cause stress and anxiety.
The ego tries to prevent anxiety, guilt and other unpleasant feelings.
Sometimes the ego helps us negotiate situations well and sometimes we use…
Defense Mechanisms
Psychosexual development
Freud believed that personality formed during life’s first few years divided into: Psychosexual Stages
During these stages stages the id’s (the devil) pleasure seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones. THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
In each stage the child must get enough gratification to be able to move to the next stage
Too much gratification can cause problems
Too little gratification the child can not move to the next
For normal development a child must work through all the stages
Fixation - being stuck and struggling through a particular psychosexual stage. You move on in life, but may have ‘issues’ that arise from the struggles during that stage.
The Oral stage (birth-18 months)
1: The Oral stage (birth – 18 mths)
focus on the mouth
Pleasure is gained through sucking
e.g. Breast feeding
If child stays fixated in this stage in adulthood can be
Smoker
Bite fingernails
Sexually attracted to large breasts
The anal stage (18 months to 3 years)
2: The anal stage 18 mth – 3 years
Focus on the anus
Pleasure gained from going to the toilet
e.g. Potty training
If child stays fixated in this stage in adulthood can be:
Anally retentive – fussy, overly tidy, OCD (if punished during potty training)
Anally expulsive - messy & disorganized
The phallic stage (3-6 years)
The phallic stage 3 – 6 years
Focus on the genitals
Exploration and interest in genitals
In Greek mythology - a phallic symbol is that of a male genital and deal with incestuous feelings.
Go through either:
The Oedipus Complex (for boys)
The Electra Complex (for girls)
Oedipus Complex
Young boy desires his mother
Jealous of father for his mother’s attention and larger penis
Fear father will castrate him
STATE OF CONFLICT!
Resolved by identifying with father and repressing desire for mother
This gives rise to development of superego
Electra Complex
She starts to sexually desire her father who has a penis.
The girl begins to develop penis envy. She blames her mother for removing her penis.
The girl sees her mother as a sexual rival for her father.
To resolve this, the girl represses her feelings for her father and begins to identify with her mother
The superego develops, she replaces penis envy with desire for a baby.
Identification: End of the Phallic Stage
Children cope with the threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent.
Through this process of identification their superego gains strength incorporating parents’ values.
The Latency Stage (6 years to Puberty)
The sexual drive remains dormant
Focus on school
play mostly with same sex peers
Until puberty begins
The genital stage (adolescent and up)
5: The genital stage (adolescent & Up)
Focus on genitals
Begin to become attracted to the opposite sex
Adult sexuality. Feeling more comfortable with the mature understanding of what sex means and what is about. Comfort and maturity in expressing with the sexual feelings towards others.
Legacy of Freud
Developed grand ideas with massive overall and overarching reach.
No longer influential in psychology, but in literature !
Therapeutic Influence
He didn’t invent the talking cure, but popularized it as a treatment for psychology disorders that is still used today
Personality stages and theory
1st comprehensive personality theory ever!
Role of the Unconscious
Freud’s theory pins itself to the unconscious and there are MANY ways that the unconscious mind plays a pivotal role in human behavior.
Who were the Neo-Freudians?
Adler, Horney, A. Freud, Jung
Alfred Adler
Like Freud, Alfred Adler believed in childhood tensions, however these tensions were social in nature & not sexual.
A child struggles with inferiority complex during growth & strives for superiority & power.
Founder of “Individual Psychology” (his term for personality).
Studied ‘inferiority complex’ and is recognized for making major breakthrough in that area of Personality.
The inferiority complex
Thought Freud emphasized unconscious too much. There are conscious drives too!
Began early work with people with physical disabilities.
Observed that while some people with disabilities motivated to overcome, others felt defeated
We gain confidence when we realize we are able to meet external goals. (those who do not learn this develop inferiority)
Karen Horney
Karen Horney (Horn-nay) felt that sex and aggression were not the primary constituents for determining personality.
Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. Children were trying to overcome a sense of helplessness.
She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis-envy.”
Freud believed that boys had the power and were given more opportunities. Freud believed that women envied those opportunities.
Considered a founder of “Humanistic Psychoanalysis” & “Feminist Psychology”
Karen Horney - Tyranny of ‘shoulds’
“Shoulds”: internalized beliefs from toxic environment.
Toxic social environments create unhealthy belief systems in people
“bargain with fate”- we think we can control environment if we follow shoulds.
“Real Self” (authentic desires) vs. “Ideal self” (should).
Anna Freud
The super ego becomes clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility.
Super ego speaks with language of guilt and shame
We hear the super ego when we berate ourselves.
Defense mechanisms
Methods used by ego to unconsciously protect itself against anxiety caused by conflict between id’s demands and superego’s constraints.
- only unhealthy when they cause self-defeating behavior & emotional problems
{remember id=devil; super ego=angel}
Carl Jung
Carl Jung (Yung) collective unconscious which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past.
A psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.
Jung’s primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud’s theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative.
Archetypes - universal symbolic images that appear across cultures in myths, art, stories, & dreams
The collective unconscious
Myths and symbols are strikingly similar across cultures
Result from a shared knowledge and experience
The memory of this shared experience is the “collective unconscious”
Expressed as archetypes: symbols that organize behavior patterns
Carl Jung - Archetypes
Wise old man
The Goddess
The Shadow
The Hero
The trickster
The Animus (masculine component of female personality)
The Anima (feminine part of male personality)
The Persona – our public image
What are the problems of a psychological science?
- Early experimentalists focus on measurement
- How do we measure mind and consciousness?
- Methods of introspection have limitations
- Psychoanalysis looks at unconscious mind
Behaviourism: Reaction against the Unobservable
Introspection is not verifiable, subjective not objective.
- Caused a shift to ‘behaviourism’
- Where psychology is not about experience but about observable objective behaviour
- Used animal learning as can carefully control environment
Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning
“a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus”
Conditioned reflexes
Found associations between previously unlinked stimuli
Unconditioned Stimulus (food)
Unconditioned Response (salivating)
Conditioned Stimulus (sight of keeper)
Conditioned Response (salivating)
Edward Thorndike (1874-1949)
Focused on the acquisition of behaviour
Looked at how cats learned to escape from a puzzle box
Animal made a response and was rewarded if it was correct (escaping and food)
S-R PROBABILITIES: (Stimulus-Response)
Learning occurs when there is an increase in positive S-R probabilities
Forgetting occurs when there is a decrease in positive S-R probabilities
What is the law of effect?
Behaviour depends on consequence (reward/punishment)
J.B Watson (1878-1959)
Founder of behaviourism
Did not like introspection, Or participating in introspection
Wanted a break between philosophy and psychology
Knowledge should be based on observable phenomena
Learned about Pavlov’s work with animals
Looked at conditioning with humans
Watson 3 main characteristics of behaviourism
Must be completely objective – rules out any subjective interpretations
Not to describe a conscious state but to predict and control overt behaviour
Believed that work on animals could tell us about human behaviour
Little Albert
Albert B – 11 month old boy
Conditioned Albert to fear a white rat
Generalized to other stimuli
Conditioned learning
Watson believed conditioned learning could account for all kinds of behaviour
E.g. human emotions are conditioned
(All except fear, rage and love innate responses)
Conditioned reflex was a model for behaviour
Thinking did not involve the brain (it was a muscular act)
Did Watson believe in nature or nurture?
Watson believed it was environment that was important
B.F Skinner (1904-1990)
Radical Behaviourism
Learning in life requires more than passive acquisition
Operant conditioning – modification of behaviour
Respondent conditioning – new S-R connections Built on Thorndike’s Law of Effect – relationship between response and reward
Skinner Box
Skinner’s operation conditioning
Learning in which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences:
Favorable consequences, called “reinforcers”, tend to cause organisms to repeat the behaviors that precede them, and
Unfavorable consequences, called “punishers”, tend to discourage behaviors.
Skinner box
Rats press a lever by accident dropped food pellet
Rewarded for behaviour
Reinforcement – behaviour occurs with greater frequency
Punishment– causes behaviour to occur less frequency
What process can be used to teach rats to press on levers?
Shaping
Project Pigeon
During World War II, theUS Navy required a weapon effective against Germanbattleships.
Lenses projected an image of distant objects onto a screen in front of each bird.
Thus, when the missile was launched from an aircraft within sight of an enemy ship, an image of the ship would appear on the screen. The screen was hinged, such that pecks at the image of the ship would guide the missile toward the ship.
project was abandoned
Air Crib/Heir Conditioner
When Skinner and wife had a baby, Skinner designed this crib
Intention to make baby comfortable, confident, mobile, and healthy
The philosophy of radical behaviourism
Complex behaviour are just chains of simple associations
Behaviorism can account for ALL behaviour and human psychology
Reinforcement determines behaviour
Including language
Free will is an illusion?
Behaviourism: the basics
Behaviorism - “is a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study observable behavior”.
Behavioral theorists view personality as a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations.
response tendencies are shaped by classical conditioning, operant conditioning
Who were the behaviourists?
Ivan Pavlov
First observed classical conditioning in dogs.
Edward Thorndike
Law of Effect: Behaviour depends on consequence (reward/punishment)
John Watson
Father of behaviorism
Conditioning in humans.
BF Skinner
Operant conditioning – shaping behaviour.
Problems with behaviourism
Behaviourists wanted to remove mind, consciousness, purpose and cognition from psychology
Problem 1: behaviour often does show purpose.
Problem 2: Evolutionary constraints on what is learnt
Problem 3. Much of human experience is unobservable.
Problem 4. It cannot explain a natural language.
Chomsky’s view of language
Children have an innate capacity to learn language
“ Language acquisition device”
The Cognitive Revolution
This new approach, developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was directly tied to the development of the computer.
Researchers seized on the computer as a model for the way in which human mental activity takes place; the computer was a tool that allowed researchers to specify the internal mechanisms that produce behaviour.
What is cognition?
Way in which information is processed and manipulated in remembering, thinking, and knowing
Cognitive Psychology
Approaches seeking to explain observable behavior by investigating mental processes and structures that cannot be directly observed
Beginning of Cognitive Psychology
George Miller and Jerome Bruner (1950-60s)
Developed Center for Cognitive Studies (Harvard)
Looked at language, memory, perception
George Miller “ The Magic Number 7, plus or minus 2”
How accurately can we distinguish stimuli: flash dots
Present with series of digits: can recall if 7 or less.
George Miller - Chunking
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:
Super
Cali
Fragi
Listic
Expi
Ali
Docious
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner: Knowing is a process, not a product
Steven Pinker: Five ideas that made the cognitive revolution
Mind is connected to physical word via concepts of information, computation and feedback
Mind is not a blank slate
An infinite range of behaviour can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind
Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across culture
The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts
Ideas of the cognitive revolution
Information Processing
Inputs and outputs, computation
Put a bunch of these together and you get a brain
Mind = Brain
Mind is real, but it is mechanistic
Artificial Intelligence
Computer metaphor
Storage capacity = memory
Programming codes = language
Computer programs function same as human mind? Both: -
Receive and process large amounts of information
Store information
Retrieve information
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Considered by some as the father of computer science
Played a major role in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Created the Turing machine – stores information in memory and has the process (program) to operate on that information
Are all other machines (including the brain) mathematically equivalent to this?
The Turing Test
Test a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence
Computer may be able to follow instructions/simulate intelligence
Turing test - if you can have a conversation with a computer and believe it to be real then it must have some kind of intelligence
Paradigm shift
Dominant schools of thought about how to study the mind scientifically have changed.
Often periods of upheaval, revolution
2010 - Diederik Stapel
Diederik Stapel, a prolific Dutch social psychologist was investigated for fraud
Suspicious behaviour:
He often supplied the data to his grad students
His grad students working in the lab remarked that stats for different studies showed similar means and SDs
After investigation, admitted his fraud and found 25 published papers were based on fabricated data!
Eventually 58 papers are retracted
When was the Open Science Collobaration created?
Formed in 2011 and grew to 27- scientists from over 50 countries
What was the difference between reported significant effects in original studies and replication studies?
97% of original studies reported significant effects
36% of replications had significant effects in same direction
Dan Gilbert vs the replicators
so-called replicators are “shameless little bullies” and “second stringers” who engage in tactics “out of Senator Joe McCarthy’s playbook.”
What are the four methods that create unreliable results?
HARKing
Low power
P-Hacking
Publication Bias
Publication bias
Journals prefer positive findings
199-2011
104 conference abstracts
54 supported the bilingual advantage
63% got published
50 challenged the bilingual advantage
36% got published
Harking
Hypothesisng after results are known
- Generate a hypothesis. “people with messy bedrooms are smarter”
- Collect some data
- You found that people with cleaner bedrooms are smarter.
- Change your hypothesis and publish your paper. Yay!
P Hacking
Statistical hacks to get a p value <.05
- Stop collecting data once p<.05
- Analyze many measures, but report only those with p<.05
- COllect and analyze many conditions but only report those with p<.05
- Use covariates to get p<.05
- Exclude participants to get p<.05
- Transform the data to get p<.05
Low power is caused by small sample size true or false
True
Potential solutions to the replication crisis
Replicate, replicate, replicate
Beware of P-Hacking
Boost your power
Open data, open materials, open analysis
Conduct pre-registered confirmatory studies
Incorporate open science practices in teaching
Insist on open science practices as reviewers
Reward open science practices
Replicate
We have a professional responsibility to ensure the findings we are reporting are robust and replicable
Direct / conceptual replications (where possible) should be part of the research pipeline
Beware p-hacking
p-hacking:
Exploring researcher degrees of freedom to find a significant effect
Implicit bias or explicit “data manipulation”
Boost your power
Why are they underpowered?
Misunderstanding / lack of appreciation of power
Large studies are expensive
Large studies are time consuming
We need to publish MORE papers, and MORE frequently
Open data, open materials, open analysis
Make your experimental materials, data, & analysis scripts freely available online
Others can easily replicate your work
Others can check your data
Others can check reproducibility of your analysis
Francesca Gino
Ex-Harvard Professor
Made her data publicly available
A graduate student found that the data were too good to be true
Found to have falsified data in her research
Suspended from Harvard
What are the key things in a pre-registration?
Hypothesis/Prediction
Analysis plan
Exclusion criteria
A good hypothesis/prediction should be…
A good hypothesis/prediction should be
Specific and measurable.
Based on existing literature and/or preliminary data.
Directional if possible
Analysis plan
Specifiy the independent dependent variables and the statistical test (s) you will use. Different tests can lead to different interpretations. The more tests you run, the higher the chance of finding something ‘significant’.
Registered report “The Gold Standard”
- Design Study
(Stage 1 peer review) - Collect and analyze data
- Write report
(Stage 2 peer review) - Publish report
Incoporating open science practices in teaching
Ensure the next-generation of researchers move on from the replication crisis
Teach the importance of conducting well-powered studies
Encourage critical evaluation of published studies in terms of open science practices
