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>> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult li

>> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal. Exactly. The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. Then it would be ok to control for parents' income.

ethbro 8y ago
> The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. It's truisms like this that make me cut psychologists and economists slack when results fail to reproduce. If experiments are prohibitively expensive or impossible to recruit large enough populations, the right answer isn't to just toss hands up, but to do the best you can with what you have. So respect to all the people working in "messy" real life fields and still trying to push the frontier of knowledge!
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  I don't think it's a truism. I would have never wondered about the marshmallow test amongst adopted children had this study not been done.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Publishing results which are then used as the basis for other work, which are not replicable, is not 'pushing' the frontier of knowledge. It's not even stagnating it. It's sending it backwards as it not only poisons derivative works, but also any relevance of the field itself. At this point it's statistically wiser to dismiss studies in certain fields than it is to assume that their results are meaningful and replicable. That's just ridiculous, but true. And you can perform twin studies for problems like this. I don't think most people understand how these work - you don't need separated twins living in different areas or anything crazy like that. The whole 'trick' is that identical twins are more genetically much more similar than fraternal or non-identical twins. If the results between identicals in something is closer than it is between non-identicals, then there is probably a strong genetic link to the thing being studied. It's just a handy way of automatically controlling for environmental variables, so much as possible. Of course twin studies can also be misleading, but that's another issue.

ethbro 8y ago

> The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. It's truisms like this that make me cut psychologists and economists slack when results fail to reproduce. If experiments are prohibitively expensive or impossible to recruit large enough populations, the right answer isn't to just toss hands up, but to do the best you can with what you have. So respect to all the people working in "messy" real life fields and still trying to push the frontier of knowledge!

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
I don't think it's a truism. I would have never wondered about the marshmallow test amongst adopted children had this study not been done.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Publishing results which are then used as the basis for other work, which are not replicable, is not 'pushing' the frontier of knowledge. It's not even stagnating it. It's sending it backwards as it not only poisons derivative works, but also any relevance of the field itself. At this point it's statistically wiser to dismiss studies in certain fields than it is to assume that their results are meaningful and replicable. That's just ridiculous, but true. And you can perform twin studies for problems like this. I don't think most people understand how these work - you don't need separated twins living in different areas or anything crazy like that. The whole 'trick' is that identical twins are more genetically much more similar than fraternal or non-identical twins. If the results between identicals in something is closer than it is between non-identicals, then there is probably a strong genetic link to the thing being studied. It's just a handy way of automatically controlling for environmental variables, so much as possible. Of course twin studies can also be misleading, but that's another issue.