Viewing entries tagged
replication crisis
My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all. However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I certainly was.
Ego-depletion theory quickly became one of the hottest concepts in psychology. “The idea really took social psychology by storm. It’s not an exaggeration to say that for a while it was at the center of the field,” says Michael Inzlicht, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Inzlicht himself was swept up in the ego-depletion furor and published work that supported its existence and significance.
“But then some cracks started to appear,” he says.
In 2011, an American psychologist named Daryl Bem proved the impossible. He showed that precognition — the ability to sense the future — is real. His study was explosive, and shook the very foundations of psychology. University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht was shocked to find that research papers in his own area of research no longer held water. They could not be replicated under the filter of more rigorous methodology.
In the last decade, behavioral scientists concluded that their field had taken a wrong turn. Efforts to root out false findings and bad practices spurred a crisis now poised to transform the landscape of psychology. Psychology Today profiles four scientists who are leading the charge.
"[Pre-registration] is really gratifying. It's frustrating, too, because you realize how hard science is," Michael Inzlicht says. "There are a lot of null results out there. I've got a lot of bad ideas, it turns out. But because I want the results I publish to lean toward the truth, I'm happy with that."
Social psychologist Michael Inzlicht launched his academic career on the study of “ego depletion.” His research suggested it was real. Then came doubts.
Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in language. In this podcast, Radiolab revisits the topic of stereotype threat in light of the roil of replications and self-examination in the field of social psychology. Radioab speaks to Michael Inzlicht about his own experiences with the topic, including why he now has doubts about the robustness of the phenomenon.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies self-control, has found that when people report deliberately using willpower, they succeed about half the time. When they do not report making that deliberate effort, they still succeed about one-third of the time.
When researchers asked people whether they’d rather get an empathetic response from a human or from AI, human responses won by a wide margin. When the same researchers actually showed them the responses, AI won by a wider one. People who said they preferred human responses rated the AI replies as more empathetic, more validating, and even better at making them feel heard.
The most recent evidence comes from a Penn State and University of Toronto team led by Joshua Wenger, published in January in Communications Psychology. Across four studies, participants were given the choice between receiving an empathetic response from a human or from ChatGPT. They picked humans 57% to 62% of the time.
My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all. However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I certainly was.
Read More