THE PRESS RELEASE THAT LEAVES YOU BREATHLESS

FROM THE STETSON UNIVERSITY PRESS OFFICE VIA SALON:

Breathless press releases, over-interpreted meta-analyses and other 'crud factors' mean that weak research results can get overhyped to the public. It's time for a cultural change in the social sciences.

Overselling slim results can get research findings into the hands of news consumers. duOctober 25, 2018

Overhype and ‘research laundering’ are a self-inflicted wound for social science

Christopher J. Ferguson, Stetson University 

Earlier this fall, Dartmouth College researchers released a study claiming to link violent video games to aggression in kids. The logic of a meta-analytic study like this one is that by combining many individual studies, scientists can look for common trends or effects identified in earlier work. Only, as a psychology researcher who’s long focused on this area, I contend this meta-analysis did nothing of the sort. In fact, the magnitude of the effect they found is about the same as that of eating potatoes on teen suicide. If anything, it suggests video games do not predict youth aggression.

This study, and others like it, are symptomatic of a big problem within social science: the overhyping of dodgy, unreliable research findings that have little real-world application. Often such findings shape public perceptions of the human condition and guide public policy – despite largely being rubbish. Here’s how it happens.