I'm sure they did all the math. It is just journalists do not report it, because it's too boring. And in this case this math would be meaningless if you didn't

I'm sure they did all the math. It is just journalists do not report it, because it's too boring. And in this case this math would be meaningless if you didn't dig into methods, experimental plan, number of participants, how they where split into groups, and so on. With this numbers one would need to report all the science article. If you interested in such details, you should go to the original article. Speaking of skepticism, I personally just believe, that article is good enough. Mostly they are. In this case I see no methodological troubles, the experiment seems straightforward, I would have no troubles designing it, based on this journalist's article and I'm not a professional scientist (though I have a psychology degree). > If they claim e.g. 3 standard deviations of risk-taking increase on typical doses of paracetamol, then there's something wrong with the study, because we would have noticed that already. If they claimed 3 std-devs of increase, it would be 3 std-devs of increase in a specific model situation of risk taking from the experiment. It would be great news, it would mean that researchers found a good model situation with high sensitivity to a paracetamol. Would be nice to see how some other factors influencing risk taking show themselves in this setup.