As you may know, Harvard professor Francesca Gino is suing us for defamation after (1) we alerted Harvard to evidence of fraud in four studies that she co-authored, (2) Harvard investigated and placed her on administrative leave, and (3) we summarized the evidence in four blog posts. As part of their investigation, Harvard wrote a…
Author: Joe Simmons
[72] Metacritic Has A (File-Drawer) Problem
Metacritic.com scores and aggregates critics’ reviews of movies, music, and video games. The website provides a summary assessment of the critics’ evaluations, using a scale ranging from 0 to 100. Higher numbers mean that critics were more favorable. In theory, this website is pretty awesome, seemingly leveraging the wisdom-of-crowds to give consumers the most reliable…
[53] What I Want Our Field To Prioritize
When I was a sophomore in college, I read a book by Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World. By the time I finished it, I understood the difference between what is scientifically true and what is not. It was not obvious to me at the time: If a hypothesis is true, then you can use…
[38] A Better Explanation Of The Endowment Effect
It’s a famous study. Give a mug to a random subset of a group of people. Then ask those who got the mug (the sellers) to tell you the lowest price they’d sell the mug for, and ask those who didn’t get the mug (the buyers) to tell you the highest price they’d pay for…
[26] What If Games Were Shorter?
The smaller your sample, the less likely your evidence is to reveal the truth. You might already know this, but most people don’t (.html), or at least they don’t appropriately apply it (.html). (See, for example, nearly every inference ever made by anyone). My experience trying to teach this concept suggests that it’s best understood…
[18] MTurk vs. The Lab: Either Way We Need Big Samples
Back in May 2012, we were interested in the question of how many participants a typical between-subjects psychology study needs to have an 80% chance to detect a true effect. To answer this, you need to know the effect size for a typical study, which you can’t know from examining the published literature because it…
[6] Samples Can't Be Too Large
Reviewers, and even associate editors, sometimes criticize studies for being “overpowered” – that is, for having sample sizes that are too large. (Recently, the between-subjects sample sizes under attack were about 50-60 per cell, just a little larger than you need to have an 80% chance to detect that men weigh more than women). This…
[3] A New Way To Increase Charitable Donations: Does It Replicate?
A new paper finds that people will donate more money to help 20 people if you first ask them how much they would donate to help 1 person. This Unit Asking Effect (Hsee, Zhang, Lu, & Xu, 2013, Psychological Science) emerges because donors are naturally insensitive to the number of individuals needing help. For example,…