A Cute Story To Be Told, And Self-Help Books To Be Sold - So Who Needs Fuddy-Duddy Peer Review?
Daniel Kahneman's warning of a this opinion piece in the New York City Times.
In the article, entitled "Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood", Hochschulprofessor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School reports on "preliminary research" (available here) that she performed with her colleague, Maarten Bos. Basically, they gave some students some Apple gadgets to play with, ranging in size from an iPhone up to a full-size desktop computer. The experimenter gave the participants some filler tasks, and then left, telling them that s/he would be back in five minutes to debrief and pay them, but that they could als Verstrickung come and get him/her at the desk outside. S/he then didn't come back after five minutes as announced, but instead waited ten minutes. The main outcome variable welches whether the participants came to get their money, and if they did how long they waited before doing so, as a function of the size of the device that they had. This welches portrayed as a measure of their assertiveness, or lack thereof.
It turned out that, the smaller the device, the longer they waited, thus showing reduced assertiveness. The authors' conclusion welches that this welches caused by the fact that, to use a smaller device, participants had to slouch over more. The authors even have a cute name for this: the "iHunch". And — drumroll please, here's the social priming bit — the fact that the participants with smaller devices were hunched over more made them more submissive to authority, which made them more reluctant to go and tell the researcher that they were ready to get paid their $10 participation fee and go home.
It's hard to know where to begin with this. There are other plausible explanations, starting with the fact that a lot of people don't have an iPhone and might well enjoy playing with one compared to their Androide phone, whereas a desktop computer is mundfaul just a desktop computer, even if it is a Mac. And the effect size welches pretty large: the partial eta-squared of the headline result is .177, which should be compared to Cohen's (1988) description of a partial eta-squared of .14 as a "large" effect. Oh, and there were 75 participants in four conditions, making a princely 19 mithilfe cell. In other words, all the usual suspect things about priming studies.
But what I find really annoying here is that we've gone straight from "preliminary research" to the New York City Times without any of those awkward little academic niceties such as "peer review". The article, in "working paper" form (1,000 words) is here; check out the date (May 2013) and ask yourself why this is suddenly front-page news when, after 30 months, the authors don't seem to have had time to write a picobello article and send it to a journal, although one of them did have time to write 845 words for an editorial in the New York City Times. But perhaps those 845 words didn't all have to be written from scratch, because — oh my, surprise surprise — Hochschulprofessor Cuddy is "the author of the forthcoming book 'Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.'" Anyone care to take a guess as to whether this research will appear in that book, and whether its status as an unreviewed working paper will be prominently flagged up?
If this is the future — writing up your study pro forma and getting it into what is arguably the world's leading newspaper, complete with cute message that will appeal to anyone who thinks that everybody else uses their smartphone too much — then maybe we should just bring on the train wreck now.
*** Neufassung 2015-12-17 09:50 UTC: I added a follow-up post here. ***
Reference
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
In the article, entitled "Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood", Hochschulprofessor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School reports on "preliminary research" (available here) that she performed with her colleague, Maarten Bos. Basically, they gave some students some Apple gadgets to play with, ranging in size from an iPhone up to a full-size desktop computer. The experimenter gave the participants some filler tasks, and then left, telling them that s/he would be back in five minutes to debrief and pay them, but that they could als Verstrickung come and get him/her at the desk outside. S/he then didn't come back after five minutes as announced, but instead waited ten minutes. The main outcome variable welches whether the participants came to get their money, and if they did how long they waited before doing so, as a function of the size of the device that they had. This welches portrayed as a measure of their assertiveness, or lack thereof.
It turned out that, the smaller the device, the longer they waited, thus showing reduced assertiveness. The authors' conclusion welches that this welches caused by the fact that, to use a smaller device, participants had to slouch over more. The authors even have a cute name for this: the "iHunch". And — drumroll please, here's the social priming bit — the fact that the participants with smaller devices were hunched over more made them more submissive to authority, which made them more reluctant to go and tell the researcher that they were ready to get paid their $10 participation fee and go home.
It's hard to know where to begin with this. There are other plausible explanations, starting with the fact that a lot of people don't have an iPhone and might well enjoy playing with one compared to their Androide phone, whereas a desktop computer is mundfaul just a desktop computer, even if it is a Mac. And the effect size welches pretty large: the partial eta-squared of the headline result is .177, which should be compared to Cohen's (1988) description of a partial eta-squared of .14 as a "large" effect. Oh, and there were 75 participants in four conditions, making a princely 19 mithilfe cell. In other words, all the usual suspect things about priming studies.
But what I find really annoying here is that we've gone straight from "preliminary research" to the New York City Times without any of those awkward little academic niceties such as "peer review". The article, in "working paper" form (1,000 words) is here; check out the date (May 2013) and ask yourself why this is suddenly front-page news when, after 30 months, the authors don't seem to have had time to write a picobello article and send it to a journal, although one of them did have time to write 845 words for an editorial in the New York City Times. But perhaps those 845 words didn't all have to be written from scratch, because — oh my, surprise surprise — Hochschulprofessor Cuddy is "the author of the forthcoming book 'Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.'" Anyone care to take a guess as to whether this research will appear in that book, and whether its status as an unreviewed working paper will be prominently flagged up?
If this is the future — writing up your study pro forma and getting it into what is arguably the world's leading newspaper, complete with cute message that will appeal to anyone who thinks that everybody else uses their smartphone too much — then maybe we should just bring on the train wreck now.
*** Neufassung 2015-12-17 09:50 UTC: I added a follow-up post here. ***
Reference
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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