Scanned the paper too with sci hub. Nothing remarkable.
But we should be dismissive of any new results from psychology, it just doesn't have systems in place to validate claims. There is some cool stuff in psychology that has been replicated 20 times, across different cultures, and over time. But the chances of a headline psychology paper being true are, generously, 5%.
To be far to the authors, they are in a bit of a bind. In order to get their Phd, and progress in their academic career they have to do "original" research.
For psychology for the last 40 years, this means do stuff like this. Get cohorts together and test claims. When one is statistically significant, publish. They really didn't have much of a choice other than drop their career. They are probably nice people who just want to teach college classes. Misinforming people is an unintended side effect and more an indictment of academia than of them.
I think skepticism is warranted, but dismissiveness is not. Honestly it's a little offensive.
Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).
The fact that most of us already believe it is reason for increased skepticism. We have a bias towards accepting things that mesh with our existing beliefs.
That doesn't mean their results are untrue. We just have to be careful not to overestimate the strength of this evidence.
Being a little offensive is fine. The question and argument should be whether it's a corre t assessment about the field, not whether it will hurt their feelings to read this. If it's false, argue that. It can be offensive to priests to say there's no god. It doesn't by itself make it false.
That’s fair. But you are just proving my point. This research was dismissed out of hand, it wasn’t actually engaged with to see if it’s a correct assessment or not. That seems to happen whenever any sort of soft science research is posted here. There is a contingent of folks that seems to believe soft science is an oxymoron and therefore shouldn’t even be tried.
It's not necessarily bad habit to kind of purge HN of these random "paper announcements". Wait until there's a meta-analysis and let's submit that and talk about that.
Regarding the folks who are militantly ignorant about the science of soft science, alas I have to agree, they are a bit of a problem.
But we should be dismissive of any new results from psychology, it just doesn't have systems in place to validate claims. There is some cool stuff in psychology that has been replicated 20 times, across different cultures, and over time. But the chances of a headline psychology paper being true are, generously, 5%.
To be far to the authors, they are in a bit of a bind. In order to get their Phd, and progress in their academic career they have to do "original" research.
For psychology for the last 40 years, this means do stuff like this. Get cohorts together and test claims. When one is statistically significant, publish. They really didn't have much of a choice other than drop their career. They are probably nice people who just want to teach college classes. Misinforming people is an unintended side effect and more an indictment of academia than of them.