Scientific Reform and (Un)intended Victims

There is a captivating piece in the NY Times this week titled When The Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy about Amy Cuddy’s research agenda, and how a “star” of social psychology came crashing down. Amy’s research was shown to be partly a product of a practice known as “p-hacking” whereby researchers make choices between data collection and publication that increase the chances of a false-positive result (so-called Type-I error).

At conferences, in classrooms and on social media, fellow academics (or commenters on their sites) have savaged not just Cuddy’s work but also her career, her income, her ambition, even her intelligence, sometimes with evident malice. Last spring, she quietly left her tenure-track job at Harvard.

Photo illustration by Alec Soth, New York Times

Just to be clear. Prior to 2012, many (most?) of us were doing psychological science using some of the questionable practices Amy used without thinking twice about it. The difference was primarily that Amy’s study captured the public imagination and spread beyond academia, and she was always part of the Ivy League, and so I think the field was harsher on her than we would have been on a relatively unknown study from a researcher at a tier 2 state university. It was mostly undeserved, especially the harsh dialogue.

I would be tempted to blame the typical boogie-man in these situations, social media, but if you look at some of the published discourse in scientific fields over the last 200 years, I see some of the same harsh dialogue. Maybe the difference is the ease and speed with which this dialog takes place. In the past, you’d have to publish a critique in an academic journal, which would take months or years. Now, it take a few seconds to ravage a person and their career.