Category: psychology

Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese. 

The article, “The development of Tibetan children’s racial bias in empathy: The mediating role of ethnic identity and wrongfulness of ethnic intergroup bias,” appeared in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology in April. It has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The authors listed affiliations with institutions in China, Australia, and Canada. The article describes experiments measuring the empathy – or lack thereof – Tibetan children expressed for characters with Tibetan or Han Chinese names who experienced either social or physical pain. 

A psychology researcher already under fire for several questionable studies has had her PhD revoked by a university tribunal that found it likely she fabricated data in her thesis. 

Ping Dong, who was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto from 2012 to 2017, had already earned retractions for two papers based on her thesis before the tribunal’s decision to cancel her degree and give the thesis a failing grade. A summary of the case the school has made available online reveals those retractions, which we’ve previously reported on, arose from more serious misconduct than previously publicized and were also subject to an institutional investigation. 

Dong’s research concerned how moral violations and unethical behavior, such as tax evasion or adultery, influence consumer choices.. According to the university’s report, her thesis had an “improbable level of duplication” in the answers research participants gave to open-ended questions. Dong also allegedly confessed to a former supervisor that her husband impersonated participants in her studies and that she had failed to properly randomize the results – although the supervisor contests that Dong ever admitted this to her. 

The journal Social Influence will be issuing expressions of concern for four papers by Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing researcher whose work has long been dogged by allegations, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Guéguen has to date has lost at least three papers to retraction, and has received many more expressions of concern, for his questionable studies. However, his institution, the Université de Bretagne-Sud, cleared him of wrongdoing in 2019.  

Guéguen made a name for himself for his quirky studies – often about human sexuality – like one purporting to find women with bigger breasts were more likely to be successful hitchhikers; and one which claimed to find men with guitar cases are more attractive to women. (The first of those articles has an expression of concern; the second was retracted in 2020.)

An article that proposed potential benefits of private equity firms investing in autism service providers has been removed from the journal in which it was published.

The article, “Private equity investment: Friend or foe to applied behavior analysis?” was originally published in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education as part of a January 2023 special issue devoted to applied behavior analysis (ABA) for autism.

ABA is the most widely used therapy for autism, and companies that provide it have faced a flood of interest from private equity firms in the past decade.

The economist behind a controversial study showing attractive female students got lower grades after classes moved online during the pandemic has been acquitted of research misconduct, according to a report from his former institution.

But the researcher, Adrian Mehic, did not get off without reproof: Even if the work kept to the letter of the law, it may still have had “unethical consequences,” Erik Renström, vice-chancellor of Lund University in Sweden, wrote in the June 8 report (in Swedish).

In the study, a jury made up largely of final-year high schoolers rated the looks of university students based on pictures taken from social media accounts. The ratings were then linked to other publicly available data about the students, including academic performance. The findings, published in the journal Economics Letters in August 2022, made headlines across the globe.

But the students had not consented to the research, nor were they informed about it. The revelation unleashed “a storm of criticism at the university,” according to local media. 

For much of the past year, we and several colleagues in our field have been trying to convince a publisher to retract a book. 

Advocates are using the text because it contains details on how to advance numerous laws in the United States and throughout the world. The text is also currently being used to influence judicial decisions that affect the lives of thousands of families.

The problem is, the work contains a massive amount of misinformation, misquoted sources, plagiarized text, and many other flaws.

We have been so disappointed with the failure of the publisher and the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) to address our concerns and our request for retraction that we have decided to share our experience with the scientific community. 

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide. 

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said. 

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.” 

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article.