3 ms·

One of the interesting things that occurs to me when I read this is the potential failure for researchers to remember one great way to test a hypothesis is to t

One of the interesting things that occurs to me when I read this is the potential failure for researchers to remember one great way to test a hypothesis is to test a competing hypothesis. So for example, in the cookie/radish story, were all participants exposed to the cookie smell? Were they aware some people got cookies and some people got radishes? If so, the reduced performance of the radish group could be related to a feeling of being pushed down in the social hierarchy, a self-esteem blow, because they were denied a perk other participants received. I intuitively feel some of these psychological experiments suffer from this. That there is another phenomenon which is really close to the one they think they are studying, which is how they get it wrong. Because the brain/sense of self are both such complex interrelated systems and it is extremely hard to make distinctions between different elements of the process.

bjornsing 11y ago
> one great way to test a hypothesis is to test a competing hypothesis. Isn't it worse than that? A statistical hypothesis test will essentially just let you refute the null hypothesis, it provides no confirmation at all for a specific alternative hypothesis (unless of course it's the only possible alternative hypothesis). A funny story comes to mind: I studied physics at university but did one semester of psychology. One day in class we did an experiment that was supposed to show that memory is organized into something called schemas, but the experiment seemed severely flawed to me and I couldn't help protest that a much more reasonable interpretation of the outcome was that "people who have actually been told a story will be better at retelling the story, at least when compared to people who have not been told the story." On hearing this criticism my professor became silent for a moment and then said something along the lines of: "I have a colleague who's son borrows his bike when his own is broken. This colleague sometimes says that his son thinks that his bike will mend itself if left to its own devices. Well, that's one way to interpret the data..." I thought it was a brilliant way to acknowledge my criticism. But my fellow students unfortunately didn't seem to get it. I guess psychology was never for me. :)

bjornsing 11y ago

> one great way to test a hypothesis is to test a competing hypothesis. Isn't it worse than that? A statistical hypothesis test will essentially just let you refute the null hypothesis, it provides no confirmation at all for a specific alternative hypothesis (unless of course it's the only possible alternative hypothesis). A funny story comes to mind: I studied physics at university but did one semester of psychology. One day in class we did an experiment that was supposed to show that memory is organized into something called schemas, but the experiment seemed severely flawed to me and I couldn't help protest that a much more reasonable interpretation of the outcome was that "people who have actually been told a story will be better at retelling the story, at least when compared to people who have not been told the story." On hearing this criticism my professor became silent for a moment and then said something along the lines of: "I have a colleague who's son borrows his bike when his own is broken. This colleague sometimes says that his son thinks that his bike will mend itself if left to its own devices. Well, that's one way to interpret the data..." I thought it was a brilliant way to acknowledge my criticism. But my fellow students unfortunately didn't seem to get it. I guess psychology was never for me. :)