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Comment by yannk | Hacker News Reader

The last paragraph states:

"How trustworthy are these results? The accumulated findings from several experiments help build a convincing case, but unfortunately the field study - which had the potential to provide the most persuasive evidence - is seriously flawed. The actor apologised for the rain then asked to borrow a phone, or in the comparison condition he just asked to borrow the phone. There was no proper control condition. This means we don't know if the impact of the apology was specific to making an apology or merely an effect of uttering any kind of ice-breaker."

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That's just not sufficient. I didn't even make it to the last paragraph and many readers won't make it past the headline. Up until that paragraph, the author seems to be building us up towards accepting the results.

Why bother writing an article on such a flawed study?

For the sake of linkbait, surely.

Blog author even calls this study "the most compelling evidence", only to correctly recognize that it's total shit in the final paragraph.

I'm all for writing an article on a bad study (sort of like a bad album review), but the opinion of the author should be clear from the outset.

yeah, agreed.

Yes, I did agree. But the funny part is that the article author didn't seem to read the paper since the paper did address those control group concerns.

Which is pretty much the same thing as writing "By the way this study is junk. Why did we write this entire bullshit article anyway? Because link bait. And we could care less about actually informing our readers"

Right, but "any kind of icebreaker" is a superset of "superfluous apology". It's a hypothetical extension of the result, not a flaw in the study.

Saying there was no proper control condition is flat wrong. There is a control in the study that would falsify the hypothesis that they were testing.

No, there isn't. The hypothesis they were testing was whether a superfluous apology would increase the likelihood of strangers behaving in the desired manner. All they proved is that making a lead-in comment had this effect. We have no way of knowing whether it was because the lead-in comment was an apology, or if a broader range of comments would have had the same effect.

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