Nicholas Brown, who is completing a master’s degree in applied positive psychology at the University of East London in England, teamed up with two colleagues to demolish the math at the heart of a widely cited October 2005 American Psychologist paper that claimed to identify the precise ratio of positive to negative emotions that enables life success. The researchers’ takedown of what’s known as the critical positivity ratio appears July 15 in American Psychologist. “It’s slightly worrying to discover that a leading journal could publish an article with so many obvious errors in it,” Brown says. His report joins a movement in psychology to clean up research practices (SN: 6/1/13, p. 26). One of Brown’s coauthors is physicist Alan Sokal of New York University. Sokal gained notoriety in 1996 by publishing an intentionally nonsensical paper in a leading journal of cultural studies. ... “What’s shocking is not just that this piece of pseudomathematical nonsense received 322 scholarly citations and 164,000 web mentions, but that no one criticized it publicly for eight years, not even supposed experts in the field,” Sokal says.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:13:26 +0000
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