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Comment by superhuzza | Hacker News Reader

It has little to do with statistical understanding.

All psych students are required to study stats, and review the study design before starting.

It has everything to with a more systemic problem - publish or perish.

Students and professors alike are basically forced to run new studies. Conducting psych studies takes a lot of money and time because you're dealing with people. And that money and time isn't always available - so your standards drop a lot so you can just graduate or keep researching.

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This.

And so far my experience is that most (but definitely not all) psych student are usually choosing psych over STEM due to their repulsion of math, physics and 'anything number'.

They see stats as an 'unfortunate exam they need to get through to pass' so they aim for a barley passing grade in order to focus on other areas they are more interested in. When they are pressured into publishing something the stats part is once again seen as "the impossibly complex part they need help with to be able to publish their interesting findings".

They have guidelines such as "p must be <= 0.05" so they try to mess with the data until they reach that point. Usually, most of the paper (including the conclusion) is already written so stats are considered to be the last administrative bruden to get trough to be able to publish.

they already have their conclusion before doing the maths?

I think this is an unfair stereotype. Psychology is really hard, the system you are studying is many times more complex than many other fields. I am going to have to ask for the source on that last paragraph too, that’s basically slandering the whole field as not doing actual science.

> Psychology is really hard, the system you are studying is many times more complex than many other fields.

If that's true though, then the mathematical rigor that should be demanded from its students must be higher than in other fields in order to achieve the same level of reliability. I doubt that is the case today.

The gp is basically saying psychologists can’t get the math right because most don’t like math and are just playing house to get publications. I am saying many do appreciate good statistics and go to bed worrying about it at night, and the lack of general reproducibility has more to do with the complexity of the field.

In most cases you have to find and convince a statistically representative sample to participate, and that’s so expensive and hard enough to often not be done completely, without having to consider that a statistically representative sample of individuals for many psychological phenomena is an impossible task.

To be fair P hacking is rampant across Academia and certainly not only in Psychology.

At that point you're just teaching them how to game the system better. It's a lot like anti-money laundering training. You know which people in your company shouldn't be taking it because it will just give them ideas.

The other part is that there are numerous psych and soc courses where students are required to participate in studies for part of their grades, which actively creates stupid biases, which kind of teaches that that kind of selection is acceptable

> so your standards drop a lot so you can just graduate or keep researching.

So what is the point of publishing if you are fully aware you are pushing unreliable results out there? It won't do any good to your reputation as a future professional.

at least you're still employed, so hopefully you can publish something better next time.

The problem is made worse by the fact that no journal wants to publish studies where it was shown that some factor probably _doesn't_ matter.

The point is to secure more funding to run better and more complicated studies. If you wait around to publish the perfect study, you'll never get started.

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