this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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50% of all published papers in Psychology are not reproducible ...
ssssh
The replication crisis is real, but I'm going to give some pushback on the "ssssh" like it's some kind of conspiracy "they" don't want you to know about(TM). We live in an era of unprecedented and extremely dangerous anti-intellectualism, and pushing this as some kind of conspiracy is honestly really gross.
EDIT: I just noticed that they also got their facts wrong in a subtle but meaningful way: the statistic is that 50% of the published papers aren't replicable, not reproducible. Reproducibility is taking an existing dataset and using it to reach the same conclusions. For example, if I have a dataset of 500 pictures of tires and publish "Tires: Are they mostly round and black?" in Tireology, claiming based on the dataset that tires are usually round and black, then I would hope that Scientist B. couldn't take that same dataset of 500 tire pictures and come to the conclusion that they're usually square and blue. However, replication would be if Scientist B. got their own new dataset of say 800 tire pictures and attempted to reach my same findings. If they found from this dataset that tires are usually square and blue but found from my dataset that they're usually round and black, then my results would be reproducible but not replicable. If Scientist B. got the same results as me from the new dataset, then my results would be replicable, but it wouldn't say anything about reproducibility. Here, a lack of replication might come from taking too narrow a sample of tires (I found the tires by camping out in a McDonald's parking lot in Norfolk, Nebraska over the course of a weekend), that I published my findings in 1985 but that 40 years later tires really have changed, that there was some issue with how I took the pictures, etc.
I don't consider Psychology to be a scientific discipline - I belong to the hard sciences crowd.
My wife is a psychologist.
You understand that the "hard sciences" are also affected by this crisis, correct? "Soft science" is a borderline meaningless term that stigmatizes entire fields of science to the sole benefit of anti-intellectuals.
Even when we take into consideration that the problem is currently worse in sciences like psychology, economics, sociology, etc.: "these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree." Social sciences are science.
You don't belong to "the hard sciences crowd"; you belong to a Sheldon Cooper-esque stereotype who devalues work you don't understand.
Love the write-up, well done. These issues are huge, complex, fascinating, and depressing. It's always worth defending science, and you're right - this is basically the opposite of a conspiracy. Experts are actively screaming "something is wrong here!"
But, yeah, wow. What a shit take. Psychology is not science, from someone married to a psychologist? Soft sciences aren't science?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Charles Darwin's science was as soft as it gets! He didn't have p-values, he had pretty birds with funky beaks. One of the most important scientists to ever live, and his masterpiece did not have a single quantitative model.
Just because psychology got irrationally stuck on Freud for so long doesn't mean it's not science. We all learn about Lamarckian inheritance and think it's goofy as shit, doesn't mean we dismiss the entire field of biology.
No, the difference in the replication crisis between the soft "sciences" and the hard is enormous. The soft are basically producing results equal to making coin tosses.
I wonder if she regrets her marriage, or if she's trying to fix you.
Hey, maybe it's both!
I did my masters thesis on high fat diets and while I was doing my lit review I realized there was no standard for what a "high fat diet" even is. There are SO many variables and its insane some of the logic leaps some studies come to to complete a narrative.
Out of curiosity, how did you decide to define it and why?
We used purified high fat diets, one at 40% and one at 60% and compared the two. We had a whole other project where each group were supplemented with lentils but we I focussed on just the difference between those two diets where the only variable between them were the carb/fat percentage, they were otherwise the same/pure.
That's interesting. Was compliance difficult? I work with dieticians, and they have all mentioned difficulty with compliance. Americans and food. 🤷♂️
Compliance wasn't an issue since we we ran the study in mice and they all liked the food. they're all basically clones so so it helps eliminate a LOT of variables. As expected we found the 60% diet induced a much more dramatic phenotype than the 40% but both induced obesity in general, but even ONLY having 60 vs 40% fat the differences were significant enough to make me reluctant to compare the two HFDs especially when you dive into microbiota stuff. I wouldn't say its apples and oranges, more like apples and crab apples... or something.
Oh, ok. I just assumed a human study, but mice makes more sense. It certainly sounds like an interesting study. I find nutrition to be an engaging topic, especially considering the availability of choices that many have now. Thank you for answering my questions!
no worries, I love talking about work! Nutrition is especially interesting given how relevant it is in our day to day lives and how complicated everything is between food itself, genetics and our gut microbiome. I could read about it all day, and not because I had to for two years!
So do you recommend a high fat diet?
60% produced a more dramatic phenotype and I remember it being the most popular diet in animal studies (I did all this 10 years ago so the details are a little fuzzy) so I'd probably go with that one.
Can you explain what you mean by a more dramatic phenotype?
In animal research we often refer to genotype and phenotype. Genotype refers to the set of genes the animals the animals carry (what they are capable of expressing) and phenotype refers to the physical/clinical expression/presentation/characteristics of the animal or disease state. My guys were all "wild type" meaning they're just "normal" standard mice and we induced the "obese phenotype" (obese disease state with the associated characteristics and physical presentation associated with the disease) with the two high fat diets. 60% had a greater impact on inducing these changes compared to the control group than the 40% group.
Ah thanks for the response!