When I was an undergrad, I heard how Raymond Cattell (if memory serves me well) plastered his entire office, ceiling included, with papers on which he calculated the factor analysis involved in his theory of 16 basic personality traits. Hundreds of questionnaires with many items, maths to pull out the common variance and reduce the … [Read more…]
Scientific methods and their associated research questions form a variety of fits. Take the reproducibility crisis in behavioural psychology. In social psychology the crisis is quite prominent, with textbook findings being actively questioned. In cognitive psychology (inflated effect sizes notwithstanding) there is less of a feeling of crisis, and yet, the two fields use similar … [Read more…]
There are gasps of indignation when academics hear that pharmaceutical industry doesn’t trust academic research all that much. We think of the big pharma people as the bad guys, the conscience-free predators that prioritise profit over our health and wellbeing. Academics, on the other hand, care about the truth. They don’t aim to get rich, … [Read more…]
Discussions about scientific reproducibility are often rather bleak. We hear that our results are unreliable, that our methods are – and always have been – weak, that our ways need to change but that this might not be the best individual strategy for career advancement. And even if you want to work transparently and reproducibly, … [Read more…]