Când Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom, Philip Tetlock și Daniel Kahneman sunt de o parte a unei dezbateri, its time to pay attention. Despre publication bias în psihologia socială. ... [T]he team asked each person a series of questions to see how willing she would personally be to do something that could be considered discrimination against a conservative. Here, an interesting disconnect emerged between self-perception—does my field discriminate?—and theoretical responses about behaviors. Over all, close to nineteen per cent reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper; twenty-four per cent, against a conservative-leaning grant application; fourteen per cent, against inviting a conservative to a symposium; and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. They persisted in saying that no discrimination existed, yet their theoretical behaviors belied that idealized reality. ... One early study had psychologists review abstracts that were identical except for the result, and found that participants “rated those in which the results were in accord with their own beliefs as better.” Another found that reviewers rejected papers with controversial findings because of “poor methodology” while accepting papers with identical methods if they supported more conventional beliefs in the field. ... What is needed in those cases is a blinding of the peer-review system—both in terms of applicants’ names and personal backgrounds and the hypotheses (or findings) of their research. If you want to research Democrats and Republicans, say—or any other ideologically loaded topics—call them Purples and Oranges for the duration of the paper. The methods and research structure will be evaluated without any ideological predispositions. Blind peer review in papers and grants would also solve a number of other bias problems, including against certain people, institutions, and long-held ideas. As for ideologically sensitive papers that have already been published, blind that data as well and reanalyze the premises and conclusions, pairing them with Tetlock’s turnabout tests. Is the opposite approach nonsensical? Chances are, then, that this one is, too. newyorker/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 08:38:38 +0000