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> I also can believe that she faces hostile criticism that isn't equally distributed among all the other researchers who used weak, but previously acceptable st
by Bartweiss 9y ago
> I also can believe that she faces hostile criticism that isn't equally distributed among all the other researchers who used weak, but previously acceptable standards.
I agree that this is true, but at a certain point it seems like a justified reaction to unequal importance.
Other Gelman targets like the "himmicanes" paper generated a bit of media attention without any real consequence. Power poses, meanwhile, have become a major pop-science hit. They're still being widely read and promoted, even by tech conferences and news orgs like the BBC. And Cuddy in particular has chosen an aggressive non-scientific promotion campaign while her co-authors have made more honest attempts to take on the replication question - if Carvey was getting the same amount of flak I'd be more concerned that something unfair was happening.
If power poses don't work, it seems like a much worse indictment of academic social psych than most other failures to replicate - the results were widely touted and are still being raised to public acceptance even as they fall apart. The challenges to stereotype threat, priming, and the IAT are even scarier - those results have become well-established and even enshrined in law.
Throughout the replication crisis, my greatest frustration has been the inconsistent narrative coming from researchers. They're simultaneously demanding formal academic critiques instead of blogs, ignoring those critiques when they do exist, and then replying with the same sort of informal aggression they decried in the first place.
I think you're exactly right that Gelman's aggressive approach is motivated by the field's unwillingness to acknowledge anything milder. And seeing responses like Fiske, Cuddy, and Wansink have largely convinced me that there's a major double-standard at work between the level of seriousness applied when attacking critics and the level applied when presenting results as academic truth.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ghostcluster 9y ago> the results were widely touted and are still being raised to public acceptance even as they fall apart. The challenges to stereotype threat, priming, and the IAT are even scarier They're in the same boat. It is maddening how much stereotype threat gets brought up to defend certain ideas, or how it has worked its way into corporate diversity policy, and it appears to be built on a foundation of sand [1]. The worst part is, if you question it publicly, you stand a change of being treated like James Damore. [1] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is-stereotype-threat-overcooked-overstated-and-oversold https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is...
- mattmanser 9y agoThe article directly contradicts a lot of what you've written and addresses all your points. It such a shame for you to start viciously attacking Cuddy again for positions she clearly doesn't hold, when this article is directly about your misconceptions.
- intended 9y agoI doubt its a double standard. This sounds like more of the usual, flame wars on forums and responses from blogs upend normal human behavior. Even in the article, one of the people who attacked Cuddy realize that they were the people who had told Cuddy to respond the way she did. He himself comments that he forgot about it and then wrote his article against her. he also adds "oh, that email exchange (before writing the article) I had was too polite." But he still respects her as a top notch psychologist. Matter of fact I'd guess its comments like yours which are fueling the underlying issue. The usual issues with communicating emotion on the internet. There should not be schisms on science, yet there are - camps on facts. This is a problem with far worse implications than replicability.