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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: see caveat from K-Wall below. Can't trust anything these days :-/ </edit>

That's exactly how it works, to an extent. In a study [1], people with self-refilling soup bowls ate 73% more soup (p < 0.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Similar with popcorn [2]. I first read about this either in Nudge or in Mindless Eating.

[1] Wansink, B., Painter, J.E., & North, J. (2005). Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake Obesity Research, 13 (1), 93-100

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12

[2] http://projectputthatcookiedownnow.com/2011/bottomless-bowls...

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I wouldn't cite Wansink... the guy had 15 retractions in the past year for making shit up.

Oh, good to know. Are you aware of more details? Replications or critiques of those studies? (As I said, I came across them in pop-sci books.)

The unit I'm affiliated with was tasked by the university to run replications and ultimately assist with the retractions. This was all done by my colleagues but I heard about it quite often. Past that I am going to refrain on commenting more as I'm unqualified to do so.

Two published replication studies (used for retractions) can be found here:

https://cisermgmt.cornell.edu/go/PHPs/catalogSingleStudy.php...

How replicated has the study been? Even a fully credible researcher should not be trusted when their research has not been replicated due to just how prevalent replication issues are in psychology.

In anything…

People like to rag on psychology for this, but the same replicability problem affects a lot of fields. Some of it is sloppiness (or straight-out fraud, which is more likely here) but it's also just that science is hard!

At least in physics you don't see nearly the level of trust until a study have been replicated and confirmed. You might see a few news articles about someone's cold fusion reactor, but there is far more skepticism and scientists in related fields are much quicker to not trust it unless it has independent replication.

Soft sciences don't seem to have a similar culture.

You’re probably right that half-baked psych and biomedical articles show up in the media more, but I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate from that to the actual work going on in the field.

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