Social Science Space

In her new book, “Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society,” Zeynep Pamuk outlines new directions that she believes the relationship between science and politics might take, rooted in the understanding that scientific knowledge is tentative and uncertain.

In recent years, many behavioral scientists have begun to question whether loss aversion is quite so ironclad a principle of the human mind

“We feel diminished,” says Alessandra Hora dos Santos. “It’s like we were lab rats. They come in nicely, collect information, collect exams on the child, and in the end we don’t know of any results. It’s like we are being used without even knowing why that is being done.”

Gone are the days when science journalism was like sports journalism, where the action was watched from the press box and simply conveyed. News outlets have stepped onto the field. They are doing the science themselves.

I claimed that New Mexico is part of the Galapagos Islands, that craniotomy is a legitimate means of assessing student learning, and that all my figures were made in Microsoft Paint. Any legitimate peer reviewer who bothered to read just the abstract would’ve tossed the paper in the garbage (or maybe called the police).

Instead of viewing rumors and myths as misperceptions that can be suppressed with accurate information, we should treat them as opportunities to understand — and respond to — the legitimate anxieties of the people who adopt and share them. In other words, we should look at them as valuable feedback that can help improve our own reporting and messaging.

The Psychological Science Accelerator is a global network of more than 500 labs in more than 70 countries which aims to re-do older psychology experiments, but on a mass-scale in several different settings. The effort is one of many targeting a problem that has plagued the discipline for years: the inability of psychologists to get consistent results across similar experiments.