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Typically in U.S. psychology majors, statistics is required and is taken in the Spring of the student's senior year. I've been playing with the idea of having

Typically in U.S. psychology majors, statistics is required and is taken in the Spring of the student's senior year. I've been playing with the idea of having statistics be the second course (after intro) in a psychology major so that all other courses could build on the students' quantitative understanding.

nanis 9y ago
Having taught the topic for almost a decade, I know that both among undergrad and grad students, Stats is viewed as a roadblock by most. In addition, most people who teach the topic, don't want to teach it, so they do it in the easiest way possible: Compute this number, look up this table, tell me if the result is "significant" ... "There, you get an A. One less obstacle on your path to becoming the best doctor, the best journalist, the best I-banker, the best consultant, the best of everything ... To bad you don't know what this all means at all." Edited to add: Also, I can't bring myself to forget the positive reception Sam Wang got here for absolutely meaningless statistical statements. But, again, most people see Stats as providing the tools with which to make such statements so they can be popular.
bsenftner 9y ago
Statistics is barely complex math, hardly more than Algebra formulas one plug in numbers. The theory behind the formulas are the foundations of logic, so the idea that even any significant fraction of professional psychologists do not understand statistics is damning of their their profession. That is similar to accountants being bad at addition and subtraction! Astounding.
- nanis 9y ago
  I am afraid you don't understand what makes Stats hard.
  - golergka 9y ago
    As an outsider, the most likely culprit seems to be american school system.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Even so, bsenftner, has shown that many people in a field that uses statistics don't understand some of the very basics in their field. Implicit in that, many other research papers in that field are likely to be just as flawed as the one discussed in this article.
  - bsenftner 9y ago
    I experienced how poorly statistics is taught in American Universities. I took the entry class twice, and never felt I understood. Perhaps that is my point, I knew I needed to understand statistics to do any serious work I was interested. I ended up taking a full summer, 12 credit hour, 5 hours a day, 8 week Seminar to gain the level of understanding I knew would be required to make a mark. Statistics is not hard, nor difficult, in the least. It is taught with utter disrespect in the US University system, with a "you don't need to understand" attitude that is 100% backwards.
lopmotr 9y ago
It seems to me that stats and scientific method are the core of psychology. All the domain-specific content is just common sense. This quote from Brown says something "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist.". Perhaps even rename psychology to "statistical study of fuzzy ideas" or something.
- olympus 9y ago
  Statistics is not the core of psychology, it is the core of having a publishable result. Psychologists want to do just enough statistics that they can claim to have a p-value<0.05 so they can get it into a journal. They don't care if their assumption of normality is correct, or if their assumption of independence is correct, or if the question they asked on the survey is actually measuring the thing they want to measure (spoiler alert: it usually doesn't, but we have a hard time measuring the brain). So they willfully ignore the assumptions because acknowledging that they were violated would mean that they would have to learn more complicated statistical methods. The current use of stats in psychology is just an attempt to make it look like their research is rigorous, when in reality it is usually broken. The ideas of the scientific method are fine in psychology, but since most studies use WIERD samples, don't be surprised that many of those results don't generalize to other demographics.

nanis 9y ago

Having taught the topic for almost a decade, I know that both among undergrad and grad students, Stats is viewed as a roadblock by most. In addition, most people who teach the topic, don't want to teach it, so they do it in the easiest way possible: Compute this number, look up this table, tell me if the result is "significant" ... "There, you get an A. One less obstacle on your path to becoming the best doctor, the best journalist, the best I-banker, the best consultant, the best of everything ... To bad you don't know what this all means at all." Edited to add: Also, I can't bring myself to forget the positive reception Sam Wang got here for absolutely meaningless statistical statements. But, again, most people see Stats as providing the tools with which to make such statements so they can be popular.

bsenftner 9y ago

Statistics is barely complex math, hardly more than Algebra formulas one plug in numbers. The theory behind the formulas are the foundations of logic, so the idea that even any significant fraction of professional psychologists do not understand statistics is damning of their their profession. That is similar to accountants being bad at addition and subtraction! Astounding.

nanis 9y ago
I am afraid you don't understand what makes Stats hard.
- golergka 9y ago
  As an outsider, the most likely culprit seems to be american school system.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Even so, bsenftner, has shown that many people in a field that uses statistics don't understand some of the very basics in their field. Implicit in that, many other research papers in that field are likely to be just as flawed as the one discussed in this article.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  I experienced how poorly statistics is taught in American Universities. I took the entry class twice, and never felt I understood. Perhaps that is my point, I knew I needed to understand statistics to do any serious work I was interested. I ended up taking a full summer, 12 credit hour, 5 hours a day, 8 week Seminar to gain the level of understanding I knew would be required to make a mark. Statistics is not hard, nor difficult, in the least. It is taught with utter disrespect in the US University system, with a "you don't need to understand" attitude that is 100% backwards.

lopmotr 9y ago

It seems to me that stats and scientific method are the core of psychology. All the domain-specific content is just common sense. This quote from Brown says something "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist.". Perhaps even rename psychology to "statistical study of fuzzy ideas" or something.

olympus 9y ago
Statistics is not the core of psychology, it is the core of having a publishable result. Psychologists want to do just enough statistics that they can claim to have a p-value<0.05 so they can get it into a journal. They don't care if their assumption of normality is correct, or if their assumption of independence is correct, or if the question they asked on the survey is actually measuring the thing they want to measure (spoiler alert: it usually doesn't, but we have a hard time measuring the brain). So they willfully ignore the assumptions because acknowledging that they were violated would mean that they would have to learn more complicated statistical methods. The current use of stats in psychology is just an attempt to make it look like their research is rigorous, when in reality it is usually broken. The ideas of the scientific method are fine in psychology, but since most studies use WIERD samples, don't be surprised that many of those results don't generalize to other demographics.