I find it quite problematic that researchers get to talk about their own research and present it as facts without anyone taking a critical look.
Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research (as more studies fail to replicate) and, as is often the case, here the sample size is quite small (76 students, split across 3 groups), predicting something relatively noisy as GPA. It is unclear to me that one would be able to detect reasonable effects.
Furthermore, some claims that make it into the piece are at odds with the data:
> Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest interviews.
While Table 3 in the paper shows that there is no statistical evidence for this claim as the effects are swamped by the variance.
My point is not that this article is wrong; verifying/debunking the claims would take much more time than my quick glance. But that ought to be the responsibility of the newspaper, and not individual readers.
Politicians don’t get to write about the successes of their own policies. While there is a difference between researchers and politicians, I think we ought to be a bit more critical.