DANG: MORE FAILURES TO REPLICATE or CONFIRMATION OF OUR LOVE OF FICTION
One famous finding from social psychology is that intergroup contact is the most highly effective tool for reducing prejudice. The more you see and spend time with folks perceived as different from you the more accepting of them you will become, or so the story went. However, according to a new study, the literature on this topic looks like it was totally fudged. All of it shows strong signs of reporting bias (researchers looking for and reporting positive results over negative ones) and what is called “p-hacking” (manipulating data to yield meaningful patterns where none exist). The author of this new paper, a researcher at UBC, concludes that the actual effect of intergroup contact is far more limited than originally suggested and commonly taught. Contact, Lowe tells us, only appears to reduce bias against those specific individuals encountered, rather than entire groups those people may be said to represent. Dang.
See Lowe’s Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?
Another famous study, another one taught in effectively every introduction to psychology in every college and university on the planet, was said to show an inherent preference for cooperation in humans. It looked at how universally infants, right from the first months of life, seemed to prefer people who helped over ones who hindered others. Trouble is, a new large-scale, multi-lab, coordinated replication attempt failed. This new research tested more than a thousand infants in 37 labs around the globe. They found that 49% of infants preferred helpers over hinderers and explained that their study "provides evidence against infants’ prosocial preferences in the hill paradigm, suggesting the effect size is weaker, absent, and/or develops later than previously estimated." Darn.
See Lucca et al. in Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers
Another extremely popular study suggested that even primates have a sense of fairness and an aversion to inequity. There’s a viral video and a TEDtalk you may have seen of a little monkey, a capuchin, appearing to respond negatively when an unequal reward is given for performing a task. Only, it appears the original researchers and others who lapped up the work were only exposing their bias and seeing what they wished to see. A new meta-analysis investigating 23 studies of 18 different species, with over 60,400 independent observations, concludes that there is no good evidence for an inequity aversion outside of the human population. Tragic.
See Ritov et al. in No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals
Unlike the above studies the following isn't new research but it seems relevant and pressing. You’ve also probably seen videos of or classes for people venting their anger by some method (pounding the ground with sticks in the forest or smashing printers and televisions with sledgehammers, perhaps.) Pop psychology has become enamoured with the idea that, in a kind of reverse yoga or counter-mindfulness, smashing things gets the frustration and anger “out of your system.” The theory is that the negative emotion experienced by depression or trauma, say, is released through physical “venting” and is better for you than “bottling it up.” There’s even a train of thought that suggests this sort of thing may even aid in fighting illness. But all of this is just a modern version of miasma theory or something because this is not what the research tells us. The research tells us: “Venting your anger is not good for your health. It has no clear relation to cancer, it may increase - rather than decrease - your risk for coronary heart disease, and it can exacerbate depression.” Studies from decades ago showed that when patients are encouraged to vent their anger they only tend toward further complaining, often dredge up more tragedy from their earlier life, are not better settled but more agitated, and generally begin to unravel. In one study, this embracing of anger even appeared to have led to a suicide attempt. Gross.
See Martin Seligman’s What You Can Change and What You Can't https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/163864/what-you-can-change----and-what-you-cant-by-martin-e-seligman/9780307498700
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