Three Conflicts and an Award
I thought I would take a moment to highlight three spicy conflicts currently making the rounds in the blogosphere. I’ll refrain from an excess of editorializing, but all three are interesting in their own way.
1. Wilson and Coyne
David Sloan Wilson wrote a little piece he entitled, “When Richard Dawkins is not an Evolutionist” for his new online magazine, Evolution: This View of Life. As suggested by the provocative title, Wilson criticizes Dawkins for failing to qualify as an evolutionist, specifically in his approach to religion and group selection. Jerry Coyne over at his blog responded to Wilson’s criticisms in an animated piece, in which he says that Wilson’s post convinced him (Coyne) that Wilson is “totally over the waterfall.” Coyne says that the article is “infused with silliness,” that one part of Wilson’s post “is simply stupid” and another is “sheer madness,” and so on in that vein. Coyne is so vexed with Wilson that he says that he regrets having done a recent podcast interview for Evolution: This View of Life. (In that interview, Coyne said of evolutionary psychology (11:55) that “practitioners tend to draw conclusions without supporting evidence,” a conclusion he drew without offering, in the interview, anyway, any supporting evidence, and he emphasized his scientific equanimity about the discipline, saying (~12:30): “If I see a paper on human evolution, evo psychology in humans, I would try to apply to the same standards that I’d use on the evolutionary basis of behavior in animals,” a remark I found interesting given the different standards he applies to research on human behavior compared to behavior animals.) In any case, Wilson has posted a reply, Round Three of the Wilson/Coyne affair. To be continued…?
2. Simonson and Schwartz
At the most recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Uri Simonsohn gave a talk on his provocative paper (proofs) coauthored with Simmons and Nelson. The paper is a critique of practices in experimental psychology, and how various things that researchers do leads to the erroneous reporting of statistically significant results. (I discussed this paper previously.) I was not present during the talk at SPSP, but apparently it was a heated session, and it seems to have stimulated a conversation by email between psychology Norbert Schwartz and Uri Simonsohn as well as on the SPSP discussion board.
Simonson recently posted some remarks the exchange between him and Schwartz. I won’t go into the details, but the remarks include the term “pants-on-fire,” which makes the episode intrinsically exciting.
3. Bargh and Doyen et al.
Recently, Doyen et al. published an article in PLoS ONE entitled “Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?” In the article, they report two experiments that were designed to replicate work reported in a paper by John Bargh et al (1996) which is something of a classic in social psychology. In this study, subjects were primed with the concept “being old” in one task, and then were timed as they left the experiment, with those so primed walking slower than those not so primed. Doyen et al. report that they “obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower.” This finding implies that the walking speed effect is a demand characteristic.
Bargh, resurrecting his Psychology Today blog, in a post called “Nothing in their Heads,” launched a fairly excited attack on not just the work, but the open access model more generally, writing:
PLoS ONE, which quite obviously does not receive the usual high scientific journal standards of peer-review scrutiny (keep reading for the evidence of this); instead, the journal follows a “business model” in which authors pay to have their articles published (at a hefty $1,350 per article). The journal promises a “rigorous peer review” for technical soundness but not as to the importance of the finding. On their website PLoS dismisses the use of knowledgable editors to oversee what gets published and what does not, claiming this adds only a subjective element to the acceptance decision that can be biased against new research directions.
Bargh intimates that the Doyne et al. work has some problems, including two primary reasons to worry about their conclusions, first that in the original paper, “the experimenter was entirely blind both to experimental hypotheses and the experimental condition of the participant and did not even collect the main dependent variable of walking time down the hall.” This would seem to preclude the effect being due to demand characteristics in the original work. The second reason is a set of ways in which the Doyen et al work deviated methodologically from the original Bargh et al work. Barge has a different explanation for Doyen et al.’s failure to replicate their original effect, writing:
The take-home lesson for science bloggers and their readers is that there are other reasons for failures to replicate other than the invalidity of the original published study. Incompetent or ill-informed researchers performing the replication (such as in research domains outside of their areas of expertise) is another reason…
So, yeah, wow; I found Bargh’s remarks interesting in part because of his skepticism about the open access model, given recent discussions about this issue on this blog and elsewhere recently. The post has attracted a large number of comments, including by Ed Yong, a blogger at Discover, who Bargh also criticizes in his remarks; Yong has now replied to Bargh.
So, three more or less spicy exchanges recently. Very exciting.
And an award…
In other news, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby received the “highest honor” that the University of California Santa Barbara bestows on members of its faculty, the Faculty Research Lecturer Award according to a press release from March 8th. The press release reads in part:
“Evolutionary Foundations in Culture,” their chapter in the book “The Adapted Mind,” which they also co-edited, is regarded as one of the most important publications in psychology in the 1990’s.
One of the most important during the decade is high (and, in my humble opinion, fully deserved and accurate) praise, and for those who haven’t read the chapter but interested in doing so, it’s actually called, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In any case, readers might be expecting me to make a big deal out of this award for my former mentors, and perhaps highlight that they were selected over five Nobel Laureates at UCSB, but the fact of the matter is that Herbert Kroemer already won the award in 1985, so, really, they only exceeded four, rather than five, Nobel Laureates in this respect.
Congratulations John and Leda!
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