User:Ina301/Social Science

Pearson’s r Correlation

r	r^2	%
0.1	0.01	1%
0.2	0.04	4%
0.3	0.09	9%
0.4	0.16	16%
0.5	0.25	25%
0.6	0.36	36%
0.7	0.49	49%
0.8	0.64	64%
0.9	0.81	81%
1	1	100%

Rules of thumb (Cohen, 1988 Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences)

• Small effect: .10 < r <.30
• Medium effect: .30 < r <.50
• Large effect: r > .50

Effect size

One Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described

Must Psychologists Change the Way They Analyze Their Data

In general, we know that effect sizes in psychology typically fall in the range of 0.2 to 0.3. A survey of “one hundred years of social psychology” that cataloged 25,000 studies of eight million people yielded a mean effect size (r) of .21 (Richard, Bond, & StokesZoota, 2003). An example relevant to Bem’s (2011) retroactive habituation experiments is Bornstein’s (1989) meta-analysis of 208 mere exposure studies, which yielded an effect size (r) of .26. We even have some knowledge about previous psi experiments. The Bayesian meta-analysis of 56 telepathy studies, cited above, revealed a Cohen’s h effect size of approximately 0.18 (Utts et al., 2010), and the meta-analysis of 38 presentiment studies, also cited above, yielded a mean effect size of 0.28 (Mossbridge et al., 2011). Consequently, no reasonable observer would ever expect effect sizes in laboratory psi experiments to be greater than 0.8—what Cohen (1988) terms a large effect. Cohen noted that even a medium effect of 0.5 “is large enough to be visible to the naked eye” (p. 26). Yet the prior distribution for H1 that Wagenmakers et al. (2011) adopted places a probability of .57 on effect sizes that equal or exceed 0.8. It even places a probability of .06 on effect sizes exceeding 10. If effect sizes were really that large, there would be no debate about the reality of psi. Thus, the prior distribution Wagenmakers et al. placed on the possible effect sizes under H1 is wildly unrealistic.

Replication Crisis

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/failure-is-moving-science-forward/?ex_cid=538fb

Academic life

General

Dr. Robert Steinbuch, a professor at the university’s Bowen School of Law, filed a lawsuit against administrators in November alleging that they had violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by redacting information on race, LSAT scores, and undergraduate GPA in data sets he had requested for his research into the impact of lowering admissions standards on student success

Biology

Franz Boas argued that the differences in skulls shape were environmental. He claimed that their shapes changed a lot when people moved to the US. That wasn’t the case: they changed a little, probably for the same reason that people in the US were noticeably taller than their Scandihoovian or Eytalian grandparents, but the changes were considerably smaller than the intergroup differences. It certainly looks as if he deliberately lied.

I’ve run into some of the wonderful results of this horseshit. I had a friend who, as a student, was working with a physical anthropologist at the University of New Mexico to develop better classification methods for forensics. I remember how her professor had to fucking whisper when the door was open, because the non-physical anthropologist next door was offended by certain facts and would try to get him in trouble if she heard him mention them. In particular, the smaller average volume of African-ancestry skulls – just short of a standard deviation smaller. Just as the brain itself is about a standard deviation smaller in people of mostly-African ancestry in the US, as measured by MRI....

How pleasant it is to live in the 21st century, enlightened, no longer scared of science. We can marvel at the diversity of life with David Attenborough; face the vastness of the cosmos with Brian Cox. These days we talk of colliders and particles as casually as we shop for milk. Science is our oyster.

Except of course when it comes to genetics. Just try starting an excited conversation about gene therapy, or about the young Chinese genius Zhao Bowen, who is, right now, hunting down the genes for intelligence. Faces will fall, there’ll be talk of eugenics, perhaps a sudden burst of inexplicable fury. This I know because I’ve felt it myself.

I felt it first with a friend who tried to tell me about the research being done by Professor Robert Plomin — who I’m now here waiting to meet. Professor Plomin is one of the world’s leading behavioural geneticists, which means he studies genes; not down a microscope, but by looking at the population and how we behave.

He’ll pick some interesting and measurable traits: weight, height, intelligence; and survey thousands of kids. Then take the spread of results — the variation — and figure out to what degree nature or nurture is responsible. He’s asking: why do we differ from each other?

Twins are obviously useful in studies like these — especially identical ones because they share 100 per cent of their DNA — and Professor Plomin runs the Twins Early Development Study (Teds) of all twins born in England and Wales from 1994 to 1996.

And what his research shows time and time again (said my friend) is that nature is often more important than we like to think, particularly in the contentious area of IQ. Yes, there’s a complicated interplay of genes and environment, but even so, it’s striking how heritable IQ is. Clever parents are more likely to have clever kids, and once it is born there’s little you can do to up a child’s long-term IQ.

Well, here’s when the fury rose up in me. An anger I at first took to be righteous rage in defence of the genetic underdog, but on retrospect I recognised as pique. Being told that IQ — or any other trait — is highly heritable makes me feel limited. I’m a child of the West: we can do or be whatever we want, thanks very much.

So Professor Robert Plomin gets a wary look from me as he lopes into the restaurant for lunch: 60-odd, tall in a way a Yank might call ‘rangy’. He has just come from the Department for Education, he says, which for a geneticist is a little like swimming with sharks, because if there’s a group of people who especially don’t want to hear that IQ is highly heritable, it’s teachers.

‘Education is the last — well, backwater,’ says Dr Robert with a grin. Then he tells a story about the dark old days of the 1970s when he was young and antagonism to genetics was the norm.

‘My very first conference was by this old guy Leon Kamin, the author of a book called The Science and Politics of IQ,’ says Plomin. ‘Kamin came back to academia just so as to stop this pernicious stuff about genetics entering psychology. There were 2,000, maybe 3,000 people. It was dark and he was bald with kinda craggy features. I mean he looked scary. Then he started saying: “We’ve got to stop this talk of genetics now!” And I realised it didn’t matter to Kamin what was true. He believed in what he called “science for the people”, which was what he thought it would be useful for the people to know. I mean, that killed me because it was Kamin and these elite Harvard professors deciding what’s for the people! The idea was that science should serve politics.

‘Well,’ Plomin spreads his hands wide, ‘that’s just anathema if you’re doing science — I mean that’s heresy!’ He looks at me, expectantly. There’s just a hint of Tom Jones about his blue eyes. Who wants to be a Kaminite? Not me. For the rest of our conversation, I try hard, and mostly remember that my own discomfort with a finding has no bearing on its truth.

Addition

Leon Kamin has also recanted, conceding in a book coauthored with Richard Lewontin that a human being is not a tabula rasa at birth and that both genes and environment shape human intelligence and behavior

After reading some recent work on the biology of group differences last summer, it occurred to me that as an ethics professor, I should write something about the moral upshot: if there are such differences, what are the consequences for how we should treat one another? Should we support policies that attempt to equalize opportunities only if they produce equal outcomes?

My conclusion was modest: if there are biological differences between groups, and if, as Lee Jussim has argued, some stereotypes turn out to be accurate in part because of correct generalizations about biological differences, these facts should not undermine our commitment to treating one another as moral equals, or to increasing opportunity for all, regardless of group membership.

But I had committed a sin in the eyes of the two referees who read and commented on my paper. I simply acknowledged the possibility of group differences while arguing that whether or not they exist, they should not matter. For having done that, the two journal referees used expletives and exclamation points to give the most venomous and dismissive feedback I have ever encountered. (Needless to say, the paper was not accepted for publication after such hostile comments.)

We thought we should submit it somewhere where social scientists would read it. We got back, from a succession of three journals, a stunning set of ignorant and irrelevant reviews. For example the first sentence of the first one we read said “this is really about race and it ought to be made clear”. Another said “they are trying to push genetics where it has no place”. The tone of all of them was like this, angry and scornful. One reviewer told us that our views were outdated and discredited since epigenetics had swept the field!

We had two and one half mildly sensible reviews, one about technical aspects of quantitative genetic theory and another by a reviewer unhappy with the level of detail and statistical aspects of the treatment of Amish test results. Since we regarded the Amish data as a toy set of data, we made no changes. The other reviewers were all hostile and angry at what we had written, several convinced that the paper must be racist but they didn’t quite understand how or why. We could only laugh at the collection of reviews because none of them had any idea what they were talking about. None made it so far as to read and understand the central point of the paper. With the exceptions mentioned above, they were pig ignorant and proud of it.