Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science

Andy · Feb 25, 2019

A very familiar story.

On February 15, the American Psychological Association (APA) Council of Representatives voted for a resolution opposing parental spanking (full disclosure: I serve on the APA Council of Representatives but speak only for myself). The resolution statement presented spanking research as if data conclusively links spanking to negative outcomes in children such as aggression or reduced intellectual development. I happen to do some research on spanking’s effects on children. Although I am by no means a spanking advocate, I was alarmed by the way an inconsistent, correlational, and methodologically weak research field that routinely produces weak effect sizes was mischaracterized as consistent and strong. Unfortunately, this resolution is part of a larger bias among professional guilds such as the APA, wherein messy science is laundered for public consumption, presenting it as more impressive than it actually is.
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There are good and honest arguments for why parents might choose other discipline strategies aside from spanking. Unfortunately, these were not arguments the APA made in the voted resolution. In a recent meta-analysis I conducted with several colleagues, we found that the effects of spanking on child aggression were so weak that they were best interpreted as negligible. Indeed, depending on how one looks at the data, it’s possible to make it look like spanking has either tiny negative or tiny positive impacts on children’s behavior.

Not all scholars agree with our assessment to be sure. But the argument that spanking correlates with child aggression (and the data is almost all correlational) mainly relies on effects that don’t control for other variables, such as the child’s pre-existing behavior problems (presumably misbehaving kids get spanked more) nor more serious forms of abuse. When studies do control for such factors, effect sizes become trivial, indeed about the same size as the impact of wearing eyeglasses on suicide. Naturally, we don’t warn parents about the public health risks of children’s eyeglasses because that would be silly. But the larger issue is not the tendency to pick sides in this debate, but that the APA is pretending that no debate exists at all.
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https://quillette.com/2019/02/23/motivated-reasoning-is-disfiguring-social-science/

Alvin · Feb 25, 2019

I can't read the link but in general humans pick a viewpoint then rationalize it. Ethics are not always on the table and in regards to psychiatry its history is not benevolent. But thats a novel i can't write at this time.

Esther12 · Feb 26, 2019

Presumably the author, Chris Feguson, is the same person who wrote this piece that included concerns about PACE: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/may-2016/our-struggle-between-science-and-pseudoscience

Sly Saint · Feb 26, 2019

Esther12 said: ↑

Presumably the author, Chris Feguson, is the same person who wrote this piece that included concerns about PACE: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/may-2016/our-struggle-between-science-and-pseudoscience
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In part, our problems may stem from the folk tale we often tell ourselves that academic psychology is a ‘real science’, and the ‘facts’ handed down through published studies into textbooks are ‘objective’. We think of ourselves as disinterested, our findings immutable because they’ve gone through peer-review, and consider our fields of research open to correction, even as we personally resist any correction to our own published research.
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I do suggest that, too often, academic psychology has created a veneer rather than reality of science. Sometimes this is due to defensiveness, egos, politics or outright fraud.
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At times it seems academic psychology is so fascinated with ‘myth-busting’ that it creates statements of absolute certitude based on flawed or limited science, simply for the satisfaction of being able to say to the public, ‘Hah, you thought people worked this way, but see… they don’t. We know better!’
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Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science

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