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Tuesday , January 21 , 201 4
BY CLAIRE CHIARA | STAFF LAST UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
RESEARCH & IDEAS TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2014
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Social science findings in fields from psychology
to economics may be plagued by a set of
harmful mistakes, according to a paper
published by an interdisciplinary group of
academics.
The article, entitled “Promoting Transparency in
Social Science Research,” examined some of the
most common errors social science researchers
make when executing and analyzing their
experiments, which in turn lead to incorrect
conclusions. The authors — including four UC
Berkeley professors — provided a mandate for
scholars to consider a more rigid set of
guidelines for their work in order to improve
accuracy of findings.
“There is such a pressure in academia to
consistently publish papers that people feel —
whether they’re aware of it or not — that
producing publishable research is more
important than producing credible research,”
said Kevin Esterling, co-author of the paper and
a professor of political science at UC Riverside.
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In the paper, published in Science earlier this
month, the authors explained that three large
problems in social science research methods are
failure to disclose information about all aspects
of a study, including how many times an
experiment was run; failure to release all data
after publication; and failure to predetermine
what hypothesis will be tested.
If, for example, scientists are not investigating
one specific correlation, they may overestimate
the significance of correlations that have
occurred by chance, explained Leif Nelson, co-
author of the paper and associate professor at
Haas School of Business.
“It’s not a problem of being deceptive or shifty
but really the realities of the circumstance,”
Nelson said. “When there are so many different
ways of looking at a problem, it’s difficult to
choose which is correct. And if scientific
literature contains findings that aren’t true, it
makes it hard for scientific research to be
cumulative.”
The urgency of promoting research accuracy
emerges from several recent instances of scientists’ attempting to replicate
lauded past studies yet failing to achieve the same conclusions.
One example of this is a famous study conducted by psychologist John
Bargh in 1996 that examined the effects of unconscious mental priming.
When the study was replicated 15 years later, researchers were unable to
achieve the same results. According to Nelson, this implies that much
widely accepted research may not be robust or even accurate.
“Across all these fields, the output of research feeds into very important
decision-making,” said Edward Miguel, lead author and campus professor
of economics. “Firms, investors and households make decisions based on
the body of knowledge that’s out there, and we have to know that the
studies we’re using to back up our claims are valid.”
Several of the authors are members of the Berkeley Initiative for
Transparency in the Social Sciences, a network dedicated to increasing the
flow of factual information in the social sciences. The authors hope that
by inciting a dialogue among academics, future researchers can avoid the
pitfalls of their predecessors.
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Claire Chiara is the lead research and ideas reporter. Contact her at
[email protected] and follow her on Twitter @claireechiara.
Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, BITSS, Edward
Miguel, Haas School of Business, John Bargh, Kevin Esterling, Leif Nelson,
Promoting Transparency in Social Science Research, Research, science, Social
Sciences, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside
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