A psychologist whose controversial publications on human behavior have attracted scrutiny for their implausible workload and impossible statistics has lost a third paper – seven years after sleuths first began questioning it.
The 2012 article, “Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” was published in the Journal of Social Psychology, a Taylor & Francis title. It has been cited 53 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France is listed as the paper’s sole author. We’ll let him describe the article, as he did in its abstract:
In this experiment, we hypothesized that men overestimated women’s sexual intent when wearing red clothing. Participants evaluated attractiveness and the sexual intent of a woman presented in a photograph wearing a red, a blue, a green or a white tee-shirt. It was found that men evaluated higher sexual intent in the red clothing condition. It was also found that perception of the woman’s sexual intent was not moderated by attractiveness rating.
Guéguen’s other retracted articles have similar premises and findings – that women are more likely to give their phone numbers to men carrying guitar cases, and that wearing high heels makes women more attractive. Another paper, “Women’s hairstyle and men’s behavior: A field experiment,” is marked with an expression of concern over “whether the paper is a version of a student’s paper, published without the students being acknowledged and whether the data presented in Table 1 may have been fabricated, as it appears to be too systematic to be trustworthy as empirical data from real trials and the effect size seems high for this phenomenon.”
Data sleuths Nick Brown and James Heathers – familiar names for Retraction Watch readers – began looking into Guéguen’s work in 2015 and compiled a report identifying issues in 10 of his papers, including the one that’s just been retracted. They published their report in 2017, after sending it to the French Psychological Society and spending a year and a half trying to get Guéguen to respond to their questions.
A university misconduct investigation cleared Guéguen of wrongdoing in 2019, although the expression of concern and two retractions followed.
Earlier this week, Brown tweeted, with celebratory emojis, that the paper about the sexual intent of women wearing red would be retracted.
The retraction text does not yet appear online, but Brown shared a picture of the forthcoming notice:
This retraction came at the request of the Scientific Integrity Committee of the Journal of Social Psychology in response to a report issued by Nicholas Brown and James Heathers detailing significant irregularities in the data reported by Gueguen (2012). In particular, it was noted that table one in the manuscript had four combinations of means and standard deviations that were impossible given the reported sample sizes (of eight combinations reported in the table).
Following the receipt of this report, The Scientific Integrity Committee of the Journal of Social Psychology was convened (chair: John E. Edlund, Erin M. Buchanan, Bradley M. Okdie, Kate A. Ratliff, and Cory R. Scherer). The Scientific Integrity Committee made multiple attempts to contact Dr. Gueguen in an effort to seek an explanation for the impossible combinations of means and standard deviations to which no reply was offered. The Scientific Integrity Committee ran multiple simulations to attempt to recreate the data and concluded that the combinations of means and standard deviations of the table were impossible and were unable to identify an error that could explain the discrepancy. After discussion, the committee unanimously concluded that they could have no faith in the data reported, and recommended the retraction of the manuscript.
We asked Edlund and Okdie, who are also who are respectively anwho are also executive editors and the managing editor of the Journal of Social Psychology, why the journal took so long to act on Brown and Heathers’ report, and when the notice would be posted. They told us:
Following the guidelines established in Edlund, Okdie, & Scherer, 2022, the Scientific Integrity Committee was formed In August of 2022 and acted expeditiously to correct the scientific record.
We do not know when the online version of the paper will be updated although we suspect soon.
Guéguen has not responded to our request for comment. He still appears to direct a psychology lab at the Université de Bretagne-Sud, according to the university’s website, and our email to his work address didn’t bounce back.
We asked Brown and Heathers for their thoughts on how the journal handled the investigation and retraction. Brown told us:
It seems that it took the appointment of a new editor-in-chief at JSP for anything to happen. John Edlund took over recently and contacted us during the summer [Ed: in his capacity as chair of the Scientific Integrity committee; he is not editor-in-chief of the journal.], and since then things have moved at a good pace.
I’m also pleased to see that this resulted in a retraction and not an Expression of Concern, which was the choice of some other journals with Guéguen’s articles. An EoC always feels to me like a bit of a cop-out, unless it implies that retraction will follow in the absence of a satisfactory response in the near future.
Heathers also had good things to say about the journal’s new leadership:
This is a good example of what can happen with an honest and motivated editor. While we might reserve the right to kvetch about the process taking many years, that is obscuring some details – mainly that this is not a ‘process’ that works continuously, but is entirely dependent on the journal being run by parties who are actually interested in research integrity. In other words, there was a long period of total inactivity and disinterest, followed by a much shorter period of activity and interest.
In particular, it’s notable that the retraction notice (a) names us, and (b) actually attempted to recreate the results the same way we did, with post-publication analysis tools. If there is such a thing, this makes it a very good quality retraction, if such a thing can be allowed. I do not need to tell Retraction Watch about the proliferation of short, uninformative, deliberately obscure retraction notices.
A few thousand more of these, and we might start to see a culture shift.
Update, 2000 UTC, 12/5/22: Updated to clarify Edlund’s and Okdie’s positions at the journal.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
I think the post headline is misleading. The paper is not about the intent of women wearing red, but rather men’s perception of sexual intent.
I quite agree. And such drivel as “intent of women’s patterns of dress” has long been used by courts to dismiss men’s subsequent behavior in cases of sexual assault.
Typo: missing the word, “why.”
“We asked Edlund and Okdie, who are also executive editors of the Journal of Social Psychology, (sic) the journal….”