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Inside Psychology’s ‘Methodological Terrorism’ Debate

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2,087

Sean

Senior Member
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7,378
Sound familiar?

Then there’s Steven Ludeke. While a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, he noticed a couple of very simple published errors involving the psychological construct of “psychoticism,” and in a careful, by-the-book fashion, had his adviser reach out to one of the authors who had erred. This led to a years-long ordeal, the details of which you can read here, in which those authors gave him the runaround, refused to share their data, and tried to slag Ludeke — to others in the field and, once I began reporting on the story, to me — as an obsessed zealot, when the extensive email record Ludeke shared with me showed he’d been polite throughout his attempts to alert the authors to their error and gain access to their data.

In these three cases, Broockman, Ludeke, and Crede had a miserable time taking the official, respectable approach to getting bad findings fixed. In all three cases, part of the problem was the sense that they were on their own, up against researchers who were more powerful or esteemed than they were, highly motivated to sweep their errors or alleged errors under the rug, or both.
 
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3,263
Yea, this is kind of funny to read, researchers calling other researchers "terrorists" because they criticise their work. The same tactic used for years to diminish our criticisms of research about us ("militant activism", etc).

I liked Andrew Gelman's response to the "terrorism" claims:
Gelman said:
Methodological terrorism is when you publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, its claim is supported by a statistically significant t statistic of 5.03, and someone looks at your numbers, figures out that the correct value is 1.8, and then posts that correction on social media.

Terrorism is when somebody blows shit up and tries to kill you.
 
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3,263
Also if you click on the link to the story about psychoticism and political beliefs, here, you will see some interesting parellels between this story what happened when the PACE folks realised they were going to have to release their data:
in July of 2012, of exactly what he and his colleagues had gotten wrong. That was when Colin DeYoung, a University of Minnesota personality psychologist, wrote him an email on behalf of DeYoung’s then-grad student, Ludeke, who had discovered the errors....DeYoung and Ludeke repeatedly asked for the raw data that would have allowed them to definitively demonstrate the error — and were repeatedly rebuffed in their attempts to attain it.

It was only in 2015, when Hatemi and Verhulst found out that (these critics) were planning on publishing an article detailing the errors, that (they) moved to acknowledge those errors and publish corrections on their faulty papers — undercutting, intentionally or not, (the critics') ability to publish their critiques in the academic press.
Remind you of anything?
 
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alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Psychiatry's critics are simply not sufficiently motivated to see its perfection.
Its perfect something all right, just not perfect science. Psychiatry can do so much better than its doing, but a huge hurdle is to admit something is wrong and start insisting on quality science, and not lowering the bar so much that rubbish science can simply stumble over it and be considered reliable.

PS I understood the comment as sarcasm, but you might like to add a sarcasm warning in case brainfogged people misinterpret that.
 

Tom Kindlon

Senior Member
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1,734
If you are willing to use your name, PubMed Commons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/ which started in the last few years allows people to make comments without having to submit letters to the editor.

For people who don't want to use their own name, there is PubPeer https://pubpeer.com (I believe that PubMed Commons are also copied here automatically so you get double value for them).

To be allowed post on PubMed Commons, one does need at least one entry in PubMed, but letters to the editor suffice.