An interesting story—about science, what gets published, and what the incentives for scientists are. But really it is about whether you ought to believe published research.
The summary has three parts (I am quoting from the story).
Part 1 : We were inspired by the fast growing literature on embodiment that demonstrates surprising links between body and mind (Markman & Brendl, 2005; Proffitt, 2006) to investigate embodiment of political extremism. Participants from the political left, right and center (N = 1,979) completed a perceptual judgment task in which words were presented in different shades of gray. Participants had to click along a gradient representing grays from near black to near white to select a shade that matched the shade of the word. We calculated accuracy: How close to the actual shade did participants get? The results were stunning. Moderates perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (p = .01). Our conclusion: political extremists perceive the world in black-and-white, figuratively and literally. Our design and follow-up analyses ruled out obvious alternative explanations such as time spent on task and a tendency to select extreme responses.
Part 2 : Before writing and submitting, we paused. … We conducted a direct replication while we prepared the manuscript. We ran 1,300 participants, giving us .995 power to detect an effect of the original effect size at alpha = .05.
Warning: a contrarian anecdote: I worked with a guy who was a hardcore ultra-nationalist, bordering on nazism. As one would expect, he did perceive many aspects of the world in black-and-white. The catch is, the guy is an excellent digital painter, and his work often involved nuanced analogous color schemes, which rely on using shades of one or more similar colors.
An interesting story—about science, what gets published, and what the incentives for scientists are. But really it is about whether you ought to believe published research.
The summary has three parts (I am quoting from the story).
Part 1 : We were inspired by the fast growing literature on embodiment that demonstrates surprising links between body and mind (Markman & Brendl, 2005; Proffitt, 2006) to investigate embodiment of political extremism. Participants from the political left, right and center (N = 1,979) completed a perceptual judgment task in which words were presented in different shades of gray. Participants had to click along a gradient representing grays from near black to near white to select a shade that matched the shade of the word. We calculated accuracy: How close to the actual shade did participants get? The results were stunning. Moderates perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (p = .01). Our conclusion: political extremists perceive the world in black-and-white, figuratively and literally. Our design and follow-up analyses ruled out obvious alternative explanations such as time spent on task and a tendency to select extreme responses.
Part 2 : Before writing and submitting, we paused. … We conducted a direct replication while we prepared the manuscript. We ran 1,300 participants, giving us .995 power to detect an effect of the original effect size at alpha = .05.
Part 3 : The effect vanished (p = .59).
Warning: a contrarian anecdote: I worked with a guy who was a hardcore ultra-nationalist, bordering on nazism. As one would expect, he did perceive many aspects of the world in black-and-white. The catch is, the guy is an excellent digital painter, and his work often involved nuanced analogous color schemes, which rely on using shades of one or more similar colors.