It's a little darkly funny how people react to perceived indignities in the sciences with the exact same behavior pattern they're bemoaning. The narrative of t

It's a little darkly funny how people react to perceived indignities in the sciences with the exact same behavior pattern they're bemoaning. The narrative of these people is that there are bad people out there doing unreproducible work. They know they're bad, but they're just motivated by grants, low p-values, etc, and eventually they just snap and do bad science all over the place. It's an incentive problem. So, to prove this, they... go get grants, do a meta-analysis with some nice statistics, and get subjected to the same incentive system. Except this time, they don't even have to do anything original. They just have to badly copy something else. There's always something like this in the article: >In his lab, Baumeister told me, the letter e task would have been handled differently. First, he’d train his subjects to pick out all the words containing e, until that became an ingrained habit. Only then would he add the second rule, about ignoring words with e’s and nearby vowels. That version of the task requires much more self-control, he says. I really hate getting science news from sources like Slate, because you have to decompile the journalese into what the scientist actually said, but the technical terms here are that Baumeister had participants perform a fixed-target character recognition task. This is an incredibly old cognitive task that was used in some of the first cognitive psychology experiments like [http://psych.indiana.edu/tradition/Shiffrin_and_Schneider_1977.pdf http://psych.indiana.edu/tradition/Shiffrin_and_Schneider_19...] that showed that over time with practice, a controlled or manual cognitive process, like "determine if this word contains the letter 'e'" will become an automatic process. My cognitive psychology professor was one of Shiffrin's students, so he was actually in that experiment, and was very annoyed by it, because in the fixed-target condition, you pretty quickly start noticing your target letter all the time. It'll just "pop" out at you when you're trying to read. Obviously the exercise here won't cause that sort of behavior, but once you learn a rule like that and start having to react in miliseconds to the presence or absence of an e, even a little bit of training will create a much stronger effect than no training at all. This is a huge study, and it would have been drastically more expensive if this facet had been included. But it also might have reproduced Baumeister's work much more fully and the answer would have been useful. As it is, this is literally more bad science, for exactly the same reason as the original science may or may not have been bad.