Larger Sample Sizes And Predicting Results
If you read the vast majority of psychology papers, they involve surveys of undergraduate students, the students are mostly in psychology classes and many of them got extra credit for participating.
On top of that, the sample sizes are too small. This lack of statistical power, coupled with a lot of freedom in how results are analyzed, means almost any result can be found.
In the past, if you wanted to get published, make a crazy claim, like that liberals have prettier children or if someone's office is messy they are racist, and throw in a p value and statistical terms, and that was fine. The results mattered, not the methodology.
That could change in 2014. Medicine expects researchers to pre-register their predictions and planned analyses of experiments before looking at the data and psychology is leading the way in doing that for social sciences.
On to: #2 Open Science And Open Access
On top of that, the sample sizes are too small. This lack of statistical power, coupled with a lot of freedom in how results are analyzed, means almost any result can be found.
In the past, if you wanted to get published, make a crazy claim, like that liberals have prettier children or if someone's office is messy they are racist, and throw in a p value and statistical terms, and that was fine. The results mattered, not the methodology.
That could change in 2014. Medicine expects researchers to pre-register their predictions and planned analyses of experiments before looking at the data and psychology is leading the way in doing that for social sciences.
On to: #2 Open Science And Open Access
