With any psychological question, what we are really trying to establish is better understanding of a property. We want to know about properties like happiness, depression, aggression, intelligence, etc. The problem with wanting to know about psychological properties is … Read More
Publication Bias in Medicine
Ben Goldacre’s impassioned plea for greater transparency in medical research publishing. When only “successful” results are able to get published, we can be misled about how effective or how safe treatments are.
The Facilitated Communication Controversy
Once again we have a video example demonstrating how a simple test could be used to refute a claim. In this case, despite their best intentions and honest belief in the power of FC, the facilitators were unconsciously controlling the … Read More
Was Hans really Clever?
Here’s a good video summary of the case of Clever Hans and how Oskar Pfungst was able to figure out that Wilhelm von Osten was inadvertently signaling answers to Hans. And even though Hans wasn’t actually doing mathematics, he was … Read More