The Chronicle of Higher Education published a thoughtful article called “Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Social Psychology“. They interviewed several people, including the irrepressibly irascible Dr. Wagenmakers [pictured here, in the photo he features on his web site]:
But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye, and that trend is warping the field….
Mr. Wagenmakers says reform needs to happen more quickly. “The field is slowly being polluted by these errors,” he says of the false positives. And social psychology is in danger of becoming risible. The article on urination and self-control, published in the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, won an Ig Nobel Prize this year, a tongue-in-cheek recognition given by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research for achievements “that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” But they tend to be bestowed on trivial-seeming work.
“If the work in key psychology journals starts to get these Ig Nobel prizes,” he says, “it’s something we have to worry about.”
Dr. Wagenmakers seems particularly incensed about that study of people’s decision-making as their bladders become increasingly full.
Dr. Wagenmakers co-authored a new study of people’s decision-making as they become increasingly drunk:
“A diffusion model decomposition of the effects of alcohol on perceptual decision making,” Don van Ravenzwaaij, Gilles Dutilh and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Psychopharmacology [in press]. The study’s abstract says:
“Rationale: Even in elementary cognitive tasks, alcohol consumption results in both cognitive and motor impairments.
“Objectives: The purpose of this study is to quantify the latent psychological processes that underlie the alcohol-induced decrement in observed performance.”
BONUS: Ingenious disingenuity?