Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”
Many folk are surprised to discover thay Risk of Bias assessment tools tend not to interrogate the question “Did this study actually happen? And are its results trustworthy enough to believe?”
Jack’s Cochrane endorsed INSPECT-SR checks have done a lot to mainstream such Trustworthiness Assessment.
One of my favorites paper got published 🤓 It covers a lot of ground and it’s the best summary of my views on misinformation and what to do about it. Give it a read :)
🔓 osf.io/preprints/ps...
👉 doi.org/10.1177/1461...
How to be a science sleuth
www.chemistryworld.com/careers/how-... via @retractionwatch.com Weekend Reads.
two teaching roles in Psychology at Auckland Uni, one of which will be focused on research methods. NZ$100K+ salary
these roles are unusual in that they are permanent teaching-focused faculty roles
Dear Author,
Please be aware that WE are the a predatory publishing group and we will NOT STAND for scammers and phishers preying on you by imitating us!
MDPI
On reflection I suspect the journal (Global Journal of Health Science) is probably predatory, so maybe I'm shooting fish in a barrel.... but the study has also been included in several meta-analyses.
While we're talking implausible effect sizes, this one's a pearler.
Not quite as large as the difference in liking of chocolate vs poop (cc @ianhussey.mmmdata.io ) but it's pretty close...
pubpeer.com/publications...
doi.org/10.5539/gjhs...
I've now written up some concerns about this paper on pubpeer. It has the trifecta of very large effect sizes, impossible means, and a p value that doesn't match the t statistic and df. Will the data turn out to be real?
pubpeer.com/publications...
"Our results cannot be treated as evidence of causality, but also you should act as if they do".
Ah, science.
Some.... interesting.... findings in a study about the effect of exergames on physical and psychological health
doi.org/10.1089/g4h....
I imagine you can guess what the GRIM checks look like, dear reader.
🤮
SHE'S ALIVE!!
good morning! here's a new preprint led by @matthewmatix.bsky.social on a fascinating idea about sincere responding on #conspiracybelief studies. together a bunch of us (it's all Matt) take a look at whether we can identify sincerity and whether it distorts known effect sizes
osf.io/preprints/ps...
The absolute state of academic spam
A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.
I found out I'm a British citizen last week. Happy to turn it over to someone with a nice paddock and a shiny bowl
I think you have the wrong Matt I'm afraid, I've never been on that show!
I am very proud to have published my second file-drawer report at my favourite journal Meta-Psychology together with Lisa Incerti, @tobiasrebholz.bsky.social, Christian Seida, and Frank Papenmeier. It includes four failed attempts to confirm a new hypothesis on #anchoringeffects.
COPE guidelines endorse this! Specifically, they say you should give the author a chance to explain, but if the explanation is not satisfactory then contact institution
publicationethics.org/guidance/flo...
1. Aotearoa New Zealand friends and colleagues 🇳🇿,
Logistics for my February trip are coming together. I'd love to meet more of you and/or talk with groups of interested colleagues about AI course and teaching in a ChatGPT world (thebullshitmachines.com).
Right now, my schedule is as follows:
I think it's possible but would be a very hard thing to test empirically. It's a causal question about a thing that's difficult to manipulate experimentally, with a messy society-level outcome. Any paper that might give you a confident answer on this would be probably be bullshitting a tad!
Good to see that Gauhar (2016) is now retracted, with a pretty frank editorial note.
spj.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
Some people bring up (1) the cost of criticism and (2) that a lot of criticism has already been voiced but ignored. Both points are valid, so here are some suggestion for (1) reducing backlash and (2) increasing impact (from this talk of mine: juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...
A neat APS Observer piece in which I am proudly nonsignificant
Abstract Research seeking to explain why people believe conspira- cies has largely focused on intrapsychic factors, but there is growing research examining structural-level elements of dis- advantage. The socio-functional model of conspiracy belief (Adam-Troian et al., 2023, British Journal of Social Psycholog y, 62, 136) posits that subjective feelings of permanent inse- curity arising from objective material strain (i.e., precarity) cause conspiracy belief directly or indirectly through insti- tutional distrust. Across three preregistered studies using observational longitudinal designs over 3 (n = 637) and 11 months (n = 832), and a between-group experimental de- sign (n = 285), we use various methods to estimate causal ef- fects for this proposition during the current cost-of-living crisis. In Studies 1 and 2 using random intercept cross- lagged panel models, we find no evidence that increases in precarity temporally precede increases in conspiracy belief (or vice versa) but find stable between-persons effects over time. In Study 3, despite successfully manipulating precarity using a self-imagine paradigm, we find no direct or indirect effect on conspiracy belief through decreased government trust. We discuss the importance of using methods that per- mit credible causal inferences and key directions for future studies investigating the socio-functional model.
Testing the socio-functional model: Does precarity
cause conspiracy belief?
TLDR; probably not
huge thx: Antipodean Misinformation and Conspiracies Club @matthewmatix.bsky.social @lingtax.bsky.social @scicomguy.bsky.social @srhastraea.bsky.social @eddieclarke.bsky.social & students osf.io/nq3y7/
screenshot from the paper, stating that no causal claims (like they did in the title) should be made.
paper title
Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title.
If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing.
I can tell you what I think of that for free.
www.nature.com/articles/s43...
Yikes. Even if they do realise, and describe it as such.... how many editors saying "wtf no" would it take before the data source named in the manuscript switches from AI to undergrad students or Prolific workers?
Congratulations John!! This is awesome news. Very well deserved!!
The motivation for calculations like these isn't to get p values for their own sake. It's to identify p values in journal articles that are inconsistent with other info provided in the articles. That in turn can signal mistakes in the analysis or writing, or fraud.