Science: "Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research"

Andy · Feb 14, 2018

Anybody up for pointing them in the direction of PACE?

In 2015, Nick Brown was skimming Twitter when something caught his eye. A tweet mentioned an article by Nicolas Guéguen, a French psychologist with a penchant for publishing titillating findings about human behavior, for example that women with large breasts get more invitations to dance at nightclubs, or blond waitresses get bigger tips. Now, Guéguen was reporting that men are less likely to assist women who tie up their hair.

Brown, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, sent an email about the study to James Heathers, a postdoc in behavioral science at Northeastern University in Boston whom he had met a few years earlier. The description alone triggered a laughing spell in Heathers—not an uncommon reaction to science he finds risible.

Once the chuckling stopped, Brown and Heathers took a deeper look at the findings reported by Guéguen, who works at the University of Southern Brittany in Vannes, France. Many failed the duo’s homegrown test for statistical rigor. The pair also found odd data in nine other articles from Guéguen.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research

Valentijn · Feb 14, 2018

Andy said: ↑

Anybody up for pointing them in the direction of PACE?

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research
Click to expand...

Nick Brown is associated with James Coyne, so is well aware of PACE no doubt

Trish · Feb 14, 2018

I'm sure I've come across these guys before. Their methods pick up things like means that are impossible numerically for the data and sample size. In other words, calculation errors or made up data.

I don't think they have shown any interest in the more complex problems in PACE. And I doubt the PACE people got their sums wrong or made up data. They just did a whole lot of unscientific stuff that made their data crap.

JohnTheJack · Feb 14, 2018

Valentijn said: ↑

Nick Brown is associated with James Coyne, so is well aware of PACE no doubt
Click to expand...

Yeah, Nick is well aware of it, and SMILE.

wdb · Oct 16, 2019

Dodgy sex-psychology paper finally gets retracted
Research on men helping high-heeled women pulled because of sloppy data.

Two years ago, Ars published a story about some famous psychology research that smelled... off. Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen's flashy findings on human sexuality appeared to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies, and two researchers had raised an alarm.
Now, four years after James Heathers and Nick Brown first started digging into Guéguen's work, one of his papers has been retracted. The study reported that men were more helpful to women wearing high heels compared to mid heels or flats. "As a man I can see that I prefer to see my wife when she wears high heels, and many men in France have the same evaluation," Guéguen told Time in its coverage of the paper.

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Science: "Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research"

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Science: "Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research"

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