Thread by @sTeamTraen

Seven years after @JamesHeathers and I first started to write about it, this article by Nicolas Guéguen has been retracted today. 🥂🍾🥳🎉

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I hope that the copyright people at Taylor and Francis will not mind if I post some of the "highlights" from this article here.

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As so often with Guéguen's "Benny Hill science", the introduction is based on what we might call "middle school evolutionary psychology".

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The alleged(*) participants were apparently expected to be quite thirsty.

(*) I don't believe that the study actually took place at all. Still, I guess that avoids some of the possible ethical issues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Many of the numbers in the tables are either implausible or impossible.

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Attempts to contact the author results in obfuscation and bullshit (in our case) or silence (in the case of the journal, cf. the retraction notice).

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Guéguen now has, by my count, three retractions, and a few expressions of concern. I estimate that he has over 200 articles that need to be retracted. At the current rate of progress, that will take about 500 years.

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Maybe I will blog about this later, but for now, here is my most recent post on the subject, from June 2020. It links back to my other posts and to the report that we wrote on 10 papers, including the one that was retracted today. steamtraen.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-gu…

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PS: This is what SPRITE makes of the claimed distribution of participants' ages (M=19.2, SD=1.35, range=18–21).🤔