The variation-ignoring junk science that’s promoted by the Association for Psychological Science and related academic celebrities. It’s like a poker player thinking: “okay, if push all in from the button I’ll win 3.6 big blinds each and every time.”

I pointed some colleagues to this post, The so-called “lucky golf ball”: The Association for Psychological Science promotes junk science while ignoring the careful, serious work of replication, and they sent along some comments:

Correspondent #1:

I think the strangest thing here is that the cited paper is just so old. By that I mean, not just the whole before/after Bem and Stapel thing, but simply that it’s 11 years old. To me this says “Nobody has cited anything more recent that we could have promoted. This is the best we have”.

I replied: I think journalists are just always on the lookout for feature material, and the author just happened to come across this research paper.

The real miracle of this study is that it didn’t make into the holy trinity of Gladwell / Freakonomics / Nudge. The authors of that “lucky golf ball” paper must feel so insulted. They weren’t good enough for NPR, Ted, etc., but Wansink was???

Correspondent #2:

Oh—and besides the non-replication—doesn’t Tiger Woods almost always wear a red shirt? Even on days when his luck ain’t so good?

I don’t know—is there any video of when he drove into that tree?

Correspondent #3:

Interesting. Even more fascinating is a link that a commenter on your post provided:

This game looks wild. And, looking at the list of 130 papers, it doesn’t look so far away from a list that would be generated by asking psychologists “Name findings from published papers that you think would be unlikely to replicate.”

Video intro to the game.

Correspondent #4:

What I find upsetting about the Ariely game video is EVEN if you discount the fact that the research is likely weak sauce, the structure of the game sends the exact wrong message about variance and expected values. “What will a person do if presented with situation X? a, b, c or d?”

It’s like a poker player thinking: “okay, if push all in from the button I’ll win 3.6 big blinds each and every time.”

The youtube video was really offputting. encouraging bad thinking about bad research.

I guess the argument in the other direction is that any thinking about research is good, even bad thinking. I guess this would be the stance of the Association for Psychological Science when it was promoting that stupid lucky golf ball study or taking its strong stance against “secularism, libertarianism, criminal justice reform, and unrestricted sociosexuality, among others.” Cheerleading’s always ok; criticism is for terrorists.