Category: psychology

We’re pleased to present an excerpt from chapter 10, “The Replication Crisis,” of Augustine Brannigan’s The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology (Routledge 2021), with permission from the publisher.

Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and unsuccessful attempts to replicate the modern corpus of knowledge. The most notorious case was that of Dietrick Stapel. Fifty-eight papers published over a decade and a half were retracted due to fraud and suspicious research practices.

One of the most poignant questions raised by the review committees in three universities where he worked was how it was possible for such dubious scientific practices to escape the notice of all the academic reviewers in the high-profile journals, the funding agencies and at the scientific conferences. Many statistical anomalies were identified readily by statisticians who assisted in the review of Stapel’s papers. The committees were forced to conclude that “there is a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data. The observed flaws were not minor ‘normal’ imperfections in statistical processing, or experimental design and execution, but violations of fundamental rules of proper scientific research.” The culture contributed to the absence of skepticism about Stapel’s extraordinary findings.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has retracted a 2018 paper because, according to a retraction notice, the first author changed data in a way that “resulted in incorrect and misleading results.”

The article, “Cardiovascular and self-regulatory consequences of SES-based social identity threat,” claims to show that socioeconomic status-based “social identity threat can go from ‘in the air’ to ‘under the skin’ to influence physiological and self-regulatory processes.” It has been cited twice in addition to the retraction notice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Here’s the retraction notice:

A psychology journal has retracted a pair of decades-old articles by a now-deceased psychologist with noxious views about race and intelligence after the editors concluded that his work was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.”

The author, J. Philippe Rushton, was affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, where he was notorious for publishing highly questionable studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that

We wrote in September in WIRED about a trend among journals of purging racist and sexist work from their archives. To that trend we can now add papers that are homophobic and racist.

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease has retracted a 1951 article by one Benjamin H. Glover, at the time a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The article, “Observations on Homosexuality Among University Students,” claimed that:

A psychology journal has expressed concern about a 46-year-old paper which described attempts to correct “deviant” gender identity in a 5-year-old boy using physical violence — the latest example of journals purging (or semi-purging) their pages of offensive studies. 

The 1974 article, “Behavioral treatment of deviant sex‐role behaviors in a male child,” appeared in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Its authors were O. Ivar Lovaas, a controversial psychologist, and George Rekers, who pushed now long-discredited conversion therapy and whose career flamed out spectacularly, as the journal’s editors note in an editorial published alongside the expression of concern:

A psychology researcher who left her tenure track position at Northwestern University in 2018 amid concerns about the integrity of her data has lost a second paper.

Here’s the abstract of the 2018 paper, titled “Romantic crushes increase consumers’ preferences for strong sensory stimuli:” 

The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted. 

Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.

Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, ““Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings. 

In an amended statement, the authors noticeably omit references to Mac Donald. On Wednesday, Cesario told Retraction Watch: 

Journals have issued expressions of concern for seven more papers by Hans Eysenck, including one for a paper the now-deceased psychologist published in the middle of World War II. 

Suspicions about Eysenck, who died in 1997, surfaced in the early 1990s, if not before. At least 14 of his papers have been retracted so far — a total his biographer has said could well eclipse 60. And 71 have now been hit with expressions of concern.

The latest such moves come from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which issued the following notice: