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Reversals in psychology

gleech.org · 8,141 words · saved by 1 readers

26th January 2020 • A list of exaggerated psychological phenomena • Confidence: High that I'm representing the current evidence well, low that all of these will stay reversed. • Topic importance: 5 / 10 • Content notes: I am not a social scientist. • Reading time: 20 mins. • Cross-posted here.

Now a crowdsourced project elsewhere . Seeking volunteers! A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup. 1 Psychology is not alone: medicin

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