Can you trust psychology

With so much on the line, I am saddened but not surprised when big-name researchers such as Diederik Stapel betray the trust of the scientific community and the public through mass falsification of results.

Even researchers with impeccable morals can still cook the books. Psychologists are not immune from the mental illusions that they themselves discovered, such as confirmation bias, which drives us all to look harder for evidence that supports our preconceptions than for data that contradict them. Psychologists use statistics to quantify the power and accuracy of their experiments, yet because these methods are far from straightforward, they can introduce their own errors and misapprehensions.

Misapplying statistics can distort results, and even rigorous analysis may fail to surface statistical blunders. Finding human subjects for psychology experiments is not always easy. Researchers often draw their subjects from the student body on campus.

Introductory psychology courses often all but require participation in psychology experiments happening on campus. While the practice of experimenting on college students makes life easier for researchers, it quietly biases the sample set towards academically gifted young adults. Knowing this, psychological research may apply more closely to you if you are similar to the typical test subject. In my own college years, I helped conduct a number of psychology experiments designed to investigate how people perceived objects in three dimensions.

In brief, we gave large numbers of test subjects the same tasks and timed how long they took to do each task and how often they got the tasks correct. I am confident that this is a hypothesis open to scientific research, but the assumption that all people think the same about tasks in a psychology experiment remained unstated and unexplored in our lab.

With so many ways for psychology research to go astray, what should we make of the latest crop of popular psychological advice? I would suggest that the best way to make use of such articles is to place yourself in the position of a researcher. Try out what you read and see if it applies to you. You are your own test subject.

You can use some, and not all of the methods of formal scientific inquiry, and issues like confirmation bias can distort your results. Smeesters has resigned from his position and his university has asked that the respective papers be retracted from the journals. Smeesters is not being accused of fabricating data altogether. He ran studies, but allegedly excluded some data so as to achieve the results he wished for.

Insidious as this may sound, some recent analyses of psychological science suggest that fudging the math to get a false positive is all too easy. It is also far too common, as Leslie John and colleagues have shown. Nor is all of it, or even most of it, purposeful. As Etienne LeBel and Kurt Peters eloquently put it recently in the Review of General Psychology , the problem is not that social scientists are willfully engaging in misconduct. The problem is that methods are so fluid that psychologists, acting in good faith but having natural human biases toward their own beliefs, can unknowingly nudge data in directions they think they should go.

The field of psychology offers a staggering array of competing statistical choices for scholars.