Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:18:34.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

We need to think more about how we conduct research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2022

Gerd Gigerenzer*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Lentzeallee 94, 14195Berlin, Germany. [email protected]

Abstract

Research practice is too often shaped by routines rather than reflection. The routine of sampling subjects, but not stimuli, is a case in point, leading to unwarranted generalizations. It likely originated out of administrative rather than scientific concerns. The routine of sampling subjects and testing their averages for significance is reinforced by delusions about its meaningfulness, including the replicability delusion.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brunswik, E. (1956). Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, R. A. (1935). The design of experiments. Oliver and Boyd.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. (2006). What's in a sample? A manual for building cognitive theories. In Fiedler, K. & Juslin, P. (Eds.), Information sampling and adaptive cognition (pp. 239260). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. (2018). Statistical rituals: The replication delusion and how we got there. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1, 198218. doi: 10.1177/2515245918771329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gigerenzer, G., Hoffrage, U., & Kleinbölting, H. (1991). Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of confidence. Psychological Review, 98, 506528. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.98.4.506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Juslin, P., Winman, A., & Olssen, H. (2000). Naive empiricism and dogmatism in confidence research: A critical examination of the hard-easy effect. Psychological Review, 107, 384396. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.384.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sedlmeier, P., Hertwig, R., & Gigerenzer, G. (1998). Are judgments of the positional frequencies of letters systematically biased due to availability? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 754770. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.24.3.754.Google Scholar
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar