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Satire of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's publication bias

26 CarlShulman 05 June 2012 12:08AM

Follow-up to:  Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications", Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit

As I discussed in the above posts, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a leading psych journal, published a deeply flawed parapsychology study (see the second post for details) which had apparently been tortured to produce results. Then they rejected an attempt to replicate that found no effect, citing a sadly typical policy of not publishing replications. Some of you may enjoy reading one enterprising researcher's amusing satire article, purportedly (not actually) "tallying" past confirmations and disconfirmations in JPSP and drawing conclusions.

 

ETA: To clarify the last sentence, they didn't really find 4800+ confirmation and two disconfirmations. As they say in small print, the data were made up. It's right by the chart.