Thread by @dsquintana

Here are the answers for yesterday’s mini-quiz and a little info on each of these psych studies 🧵

https://twitter.com/dsquintana/status/1451797415632293888

1. The bottomless soup bowl study 🍜🍜🍜🍜

Participants who ate soup from bowls that were refillable, unbeknownst to them, ate 73% more soup than those eating from normal bowls pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15761167/

Here is Brian Wansink with the refillable bowl ⬇️

This study has been cited over 700 times and won an Ig Nobel prize, but the numbers reported in the paper are… suspicious jamesheathers.medium.com/sprite-case-st… and there are doubts this study ever actually happened statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/20/did…

2. The salmon in the MRI scanner study 🐟🧠

Another Ig Nobel winner! 🏆

This MRI study demonstrated significant activation in a dead salmon’s brain while presenting the salmon with images psychology.mcmaster.ca/bennett/psy710…

I know this isn’t a study in the strict sense or even strictly a psych study, but fMRI *is* widely used in psych. While was really about the risks of false positives, in practice, fMRI studies aren’t run like this. Here’s more on this from @Neuro_Skeptic discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets…

3. Intranasal oxytocin administration increases trust behaviors 💨👃🤝

This study basically kicked off a whole research field, that the hormone oxytocin can influence social behavior. For more on this, and a recent replication attempt, see my blogpost dsquintana.blog/oxytocin-trust…

4. Precognition 🙇‍♂️🔮✅

Some people have said that the recent history of psychology can be divided by this study: Pre-Bem and post-Bem. Here’s the study
content.apa.org/record/2011-01…

Replication attempts were not successful journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

5. Ego depletion 💪💪🥱

My undergraduate thesis investigated whether depleting self control in one domain can deplete a general self-control resource that influences other domains. It didn’t work. A recent multi lab replication attempt found the same journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09…

Are you noticing a trend?

6. Elderly priming 👴🧓🚶‍♂️

This study reported that unconsciously priming people with elderly stereotypes leads them to walk more slowly psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-06…

And yes, dear reader, this one has not replicated either journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

7. Stanford prison experiment 👮‍♀️👨

You all know this one. But you might not know this has *also* been debunked psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-45…

8. The color red on women increases attractiveness 💄😍

These kind of papers obviously make a splash in the media, but some of this work from one author in particular, that has received media attention, has also been shown to have problems steamtraen.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-revi…

This is obviously a larger field then one author, but this author has been very prominent in this field

9. Kids who observe violence act violent 🤡🤜

In this study, kids that observed an adult punching an inflatable clown were more likely to also punch and kick the clown psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-00…

10. The invisible gorilla 🏀🦍

People were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed between people. During this, someone in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. About 50% of people don’t notice the gorilla. Also an Ig Nobel winner

This concept *has* been shown to replicate journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.106…

Coincidentally, all the players in this video have gone on to very successful careers in academia and medicine. Check out this thread

https://twitter.com/SBMost/status/1451915908629164044

It can seem like a dire situation for the psychological sciences that many of its iconic studies have been found to be problematic or haven’t replicated. But I’m actually *hopeful* now these problems have been identified, because it means we can work on solutions

For a great discussion of replication issues in the psychological science and some solutions, have a listen to this @hertzpodcast episode with @chrisdc77 everythinghertz.com/56

A scientific field that is not willing to call out its own issues and admit when things don’t work is not a healthy field. In fact, I’d be very skeptical of any field that *doesn’t* publish null results.