This week’s reading discussed misinterpretations and other concerns within the social sciences community. For this post, I decided to dive deep into Gelman’s (2016) timeline that led to the replication crisis, more specifically, I focused on the year 2008.
Gemlan’s timeline of, as I like to call it, the collapse of the statistical empire, was truly entertaining. 2008 caught my attention because it was the year of the media hype. As I continued the readings I couldn’t stop thinking about the severity of this issue, and how relevant and popular this controversy has been over the past few years.
Gemlan (2016), specifically refers to the concept of “opinion blogging”, which caused a trend from general scientific criticism to popular criticism. Gelman mentioned the birth of the blog Neuroskeptic, which criticized scientific reports and the scientific field. However, it’s no longer 2008 and “opinion bloggers” have grown out of their Neuroskeptic blog post and into something much bigger (seriously, the writer now posts for Discover Magazine). To me, in 2016, opinion blogging includes web bloggers (people like Gelman), opinions of those who influence others (think Leo DiCaprio and his involvement as an environmental activist), and the media (NY Times, CNN, local news, etc.); basically anyone who reports and influences the understanding and interpretation of scientific data.
I decide to see what media or blog criticism I could find that seemed “big enough” to report for this assignment. The blog post I found was by Daniel Simons. Simons (2015) was asked to provide his thoughts on a recently published article Inattentional deafness: Visual load leads to time-specific suppression of auditory evoked responses by Molly, Griffiths, Chait, & Lavie (2015). In this case, Simons (the blogger) was in the position to discuss the interpretation of the results by a higher critic, the media.
Before we move forward it’s important that we understand the research topic. According to Simons (2015), inattentional deafness is a failure to notice an unexpected but obvious stimuli when focusing on something else. For example, you’re deep into that rerun of Game of Thrones, your conniving cat finally swats the fish bowl onto the floor, you didn’t even flinch. That my friend is inattentional deafness.
In the study by Molly, Griffiths, Chait, & Lavie (2015), participants were asked to focus on a visual task, then tell the researcher if they did or did not hear a sound. Let’s go back to the Game of Thrones scenerio. In this example, you’re deep into the episode of Game of Thrones, I tell you there is a chance your conniving cat will make a loud bang during this episode, did you notice, yes or no? This is not inattentional deafness because you knew a sound would or would not occur. This in fact is a misuse of terms, but we’ll save that topic for another blog post. The point here is that you understand what inattentional deafnesss is and what it is not.
Once we move past the misuse of terms, Molly et. al.’s (2015) article actually focused on the link between the brain, activation in the auditory cortex, and the behavior, the detection of the sound. To simplify, the study focused on accuracy of noticing a sound when completing a visual task.
So, just as Gelman did, we will not criticize the paper (or misuse of terms) but focus on the reports. Below you can find actual report headlines:
Focusing on a Task May Leave You Temporarily Deaf!
Study Explains How Screen Time Causes ‘Inattentional Deadness”!
Did You Know Watching Something Makes You Temporarily Deaf?
(above is a link to the footage from the report on Good Morning America)
While Gelman argued that this problem arose in 2008, we can see that the Neuroskeptic was just the beginning. Whether an opinion blogger is misinterpreting the data or falsifying it for reports it should be noted that skepticism is not frowned upon in our field. We’ve gone from “soft targets” of 2008 (prayer studies, anti-vaccine reports) to mainstream media (Gelman, 2016).
This example got me thinking, how do I avoid making the mistake of misinterpretation results or making false claims. Luckily, Greenland et. al. (2016) generously provided us with 25 reasons scientific data is misinterpreted to avoid what he referred to as potentially disastrous conclusions. Understanding the skepticism and frequent errors will make us all better scientists and statisticians so I plan to keep this article close by because as we’ve seen, these mistakes can lead to cutting corners, frequent mistakes, and even, dare I say it, falsification (Gelman, 2016).
Below is a link to the Neuroskeptic blog post mentioned by Gelman (2016). Neuroskeptic seeks to criticize scientific research. Check out some of the current discussions to see if you agree or disagree with Gelman. Do you agree with how the study is reported? Should the study be reported at all?
References
Gelman A., 2016. What has happened down here is the winds have changed. Retrieved from http://andrewgelman.com/.
Greenland, S., Senn, S. J., Rothman, K. J., Carlin, J. B., Poole, C., Goodman, S. N., & Altman, D. G. (2016). Statistical tests, P. European journal of epidemiology, 31(4), 337–350.
Simons, D. (2015) Visual effort and inattentional deafness [Web log Comment]. Retrieved from http://blog.dansimons.com/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-06:00&updated max=2016–01–01T00:00:00–06:00&max-results=2
