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Comment by QuiDortDine

2 years ago

Coming from a psychology major myself, scientific studies should never be cited before being reproduced, especially not psychology studies.

It seems a lot of the (pop) psychology taken for granted is based on single, flawed studies.

  • Exactly. Just like that one study saying how cyclists wearing helmets in trafic are more in danger than those without because car drivers supposedly are more careful with the non helmet wearing crowd, that peers here keep bringing up as a reason to cycle without a helmet.

    Tip from my SO who does ER work at the hospital: wear a helmet to give her less work

Without having read in-depth either original paper, it seems like the issue here is much simpler than reproduction (though reproduction is the gold standard as is totally under-appreciated these days).

Rather, it seems the authors made a much simpler mistake: hypotheses can only be refuted by evidence, not confirmed. So, in this case, if the hypothesis is "judges act more harshly when hungry", what they should have been doing is looking for evidence disproving that statement. Instead, they seem to have presented a correlation and a suggestion, which is not the same thing as a scientific finding.