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Comment by MarkusQ | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly many things seem to be spoiled by the "too many of the people being studied were actually other researchers trying to study the same thing" (or even more commonly, students being taught about the thing).

I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.

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Interestingly banning a far right party in Germany failed at the constitutional court a few years back with one of the arguments being too many party members were actually paid informants of the authorities and thus it wasn't reliably possible to distinguish what the party did on its own vs what the authorities caused. I think many people concluded that the party finances were mostly kept stable by these informants, so the easiest way to get rid of them would be to drastically reduce that.

There's a common joke that defines psychology as the scientific discipline studying the undergraduate psychology students. That is obviously due to the fact that a lot of research subjects are found where it's easiest to find them - right on campus, and a lot of people who have time and desire to participate in studies (instead of, you know, working) are the students themselves.

I heard there’s a requirement to participate in the studies if you’re in some psychology undergrads.

I was required when I took (two) undergraduate psychology classes. Also, when I was in grad school I did a few, because they paid (I think) £5 per - which was, in the days of £1 Green King pints and no outside income, well worth pursuing.

I took 101 at San Jose State and had to participate in a study as part of the curriculum. It was pretty cool. I went to the NASA Ames research center and did a study of seeing how well people could predict an object being exactly on the side of them. It was small spheres that came at you then went out of view and you clicked a butten when you thought they were exactly on your side. The tech was the most interesting, 90's era VR run on a Silicon Graphics reality engine. We has Iris boxes in the computer art lab but this thing was a much bigger...

I don't know about the others referenced in the article or what else you might be referring to, but that wasn't the case with When Prophesy Fails or the Stanford Prison Experiment though. That was more or less fraud. The researchers put their thumb on the scale significantly.

Oh yeah. I'm not saying that's the only way things can go off the rails. But with regard to "When Prophesy Fails" specifically, TFA says:

"A new paper finds a different story in the archives of the lead author, Leon Festinger. Up to half of the attendees at cult meetings may have been undercover researchers. One of them became a leader in the cult and encouraged other members to make statements that would look good in the book."

Unless I recall incorrectly, they were undercover researchers in Festinger's employ. Not that many researchers happened to converge on the same very small, obscure cult.

But perhaps I misinterpreted you? I took the impression from your comment you thought several groups of researchers were stepping on each other's toes, but reading it back, I see that you didn't explicitly say that. So perhaps I read that in.

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