Author Archives: Daniel Lakens
The Red Team Challenge (Part 4): The Wildcard Reviewer
Two remarkable moments as a researcher are publishing your first first-author article and the first time a journal editor asks you to review a paper.
Well, at least I imagine so. I haven’t experienced either yet. Yet,for some reason, the author of the Red Team Challenge accepted me as a (paid) reviewer for their audacious project.
I believe I am one of the few scientists to receive money for a peer review before doing any unpaid peer-reviews. I’m also perhaps one of the few to review a paper before having any first-author papers. Quite likely, I am the first one to do both at the same time.
I am, nevertheless, a science aficionado. I’ve breathed science for the past 9 years, working in10 different laboratories before joining the Computational Systems Biology Lab at the University of São Paulo, where I am pursuing my PhD. I like this whole thing of understanding more about the world, reading, doing experiments, sharing findings with people. That is my thing (to be fair, that is likely our thing).
I also had my crises with the scientific world. A lot of findings in the literature are contradictory. And many others are simply wrong. And they stay wrong, right? It is incredible, but people usually do not update articles even given a need for corrections. The all-powerful, waxy stamp of peer-reviewed is given to a monolithic text-and-figure-and-table PDF, and this pdf is then frozen forever in the hall of fame. And it costs a crazy amount of money to lock this frozen pdf behind paywalls.
I have always been very thorough in my evaluation of any work. With time, I discovered that, for some reason, people don’t like to have their works criticized (who would imagine, huh?). That can be attenuated by a lot of training in how to communicate. But even then, people frown upon even constructive criticism. If it is a critic about something that is already published, then it is even worse. So I got quite excited when I saw this call for people to have a carte blanche to criticize a piece of work as much as possible.
I got to know the Red Team Challenge via a Whatsapp message sent by Olavo Amaral, who leads the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative. Well, it looked cool, it paid a fairly decent amount of money, and the application was simple (it did not require a letter of recommendation or anything like this). So I thought: “Why not? I do not know a thing about psychology, but I can maybe spot a few uncorrected multiple comparisons here and there, and I can definitely look at the code.”
I got lucky that the Blue Team (Coles et al.) had a place for random skills (the so-called wildcard category) in their system for selecting reviewers. About a week after applying, I received a message in my mail that stated that I had been chosen as a reviewer. “Great! What do I do now?”
I was obviously a bit scared of making a big blunder or at least just making it way below expectations. But there was a thing that tranquilized me: I was hired. This was not an invitation based on expectations or a pre-existing relationship with the ones hiring me. People were actually paying me, and my tasks for the job were crystal clear.
If I somehow failed to provide a great review, it would not affect my professional life whatsoever (I guess). I had just the responsibility to do a good job that any person has after signing a contract.
I am not a psychologist by training, and so I knew beforehand that the details of the work would be beyond my reach. However, after reading the manuscript, I felt even worse: the manuscript was excellent. Or I mean, at least a lot of care was taken when planning and important experimental details as far as I could tell as an outsider.
It is not uncommon for me to cringe upon a few dangling uncorrected p-values here and there, even when reading something slightly out of my expertise. Or to find some evidence of optional stopping. Or pinpoint some statistical tests from which you cannot really tell what the null hypothesis is and what actually is being tested.
That did not happen. However, everyone involved knew that I was not a psychologist. I was plucked from the class of miscellaneous reviewers. From the start, I knew that I could contribute the most by reviewing the code.
I am a computational biologist, and our peers in the computer sciences usually look down on our code. For example, software engineers called a high profile epidemiological modeling code a “null I would say that lack of computational reproducibility is pervasive throughout science, and not restricted to a discipline or the other.
Luckily, I have always been interested in best practices. I might not always follow them (“do what I say not what I do”), mainly because of environmental constraints. Journals don’t require clean code, for example. And I’ve never heard about “proofreadings” of scripts that come alongside papers.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that the code from the paper was good, better than most of the code I’ve seen in biology-related scripts. It was filled with comments. The required packages were laid down at the beginning of the script. The environment was cleared in the first line so to avoid dangling global variables.
These are all good practices. If journals asked reviewers to check code (which they usually do not), it would come out virtually unscathed.
But I was being paid to review it, so I had to find something. There are some things that can improve one’s code and make it much easier to check and validate. One can avoid commenting too much by using clear variable names, and you do not have to lay down the packages used if the code is containerized (with Docker, for example). A bit of refactoring could be done here and there, also, extracting out functions that were repeatedly used across the code. That was mostly what my review focused on, honestly.
Although these things are relatively minor, they do make a difference. It is a bit like the difference in prose between a non-writer and an experienced writer. The raw content might be the same, but the effectiveness of communication can vary a lot. And reading code can be already challenging, so it is always good to make it easier for the reader (and the reviewer, by extension).
Anyways, I have sent 11 issue reports (below the mean of ~20, but precisely the median of 11 reports/reviewer), and Ruben Arslan, the neutral arbiter, considered one of them to be a major issue. Later, Daniël and Nicholas mentioned that the reviews were helpful, so I am led to believe that somehow I contributed to future improvements in this report. Science wins, I guess.
One interesting aspect of being hired by the authors is that I did not feel compelled to state whether I thought the work was relevant or novel. The work is obviously important for the authors who hired me. The current peer-review system mixes the evaluation of thoroughness and novelty under the same brand. That might be suboptimal in some cases. A good reviewer for statistics, or code, for example, might not feel that they can tell how much a “contribution is significant or only incremental,” as currently required. If that was a requirement for the Red Team Challenge, I would not have been able to be a part of the Red Team.
This mix of functions may be preventing us from getting more efficient reviews. We know that gross mistakes pass peer review. I’d trust a regularly updated preprint, with thorough, open, commissioned peer review, for example. I am sure we can come up with better ways of giving “this-is-good-science” stamps and improve the effectiveness of peer reviews.
To sum up, it felt very good to be in a system with the right incentives. Amidst this whole pandemic thing and chaos everywhere, I ended up being part of something really wonderful. Nicholas, Daniël, and all the others involved in the Red Team challenge are providing prime evidence that an alternate system is viable. Maybe one day, we will have reviewer-for-hire marketplaces and more adequate review incentives. When that day comes, I will be there, be it hiring or being hired.
The Red Team Challenge (Part 3): Is it Feasible in Practice?
By Daniel Lakens & Leo Tiokhin
Also read Part 1 and Part 2 in this series on our Red Team Challenge.
Six weeks ago, we launched the Red Team Challenge: a feasibility study to see whether it could be worthwhile to pay people to find errors in scientific research. In our project, we wanted to see to what extent a “Red Team” – people hired to criticize a scientific study with the goal to improve it – would improve the quality of the resulting scientific work.
Currently, the way that error detection works in science is a bit peculiar. Papers go through the peer-review process and get the peer-reviewed “stamp of approval”. Then, upon publication, some of these same papers receive immediate and widespread criticism. Sometimes this even leads to formal corrections or retractions. And this happens even at some of the most prestigious scientific journals.
So, it seems that our current mechanisms of scientific quality control leave something to be desired. Nicholas Coles, Ruben Arslan, and the authors of this post (Leo Tiokhin and Daniël Lakens) were interested in whether Red Teams might be one way to improve quality control in science.
Ideally, a Red Team joins a research project from the start and criticizes each step of the process. However, doing this would have taken the duration of an entire study. At the time, it also seemed a bit premature — we didn’t know whether anyone would be interested in a Red Team approach, how it would work in practice, and so on. So, instead, Nicholas Coles, Brooke Frohlich, Jeff Larsen, and Lowell Gaertner volunteered one of their manuscripts (a completed study that they were ready to submit for publication). We put out a call on Twitter, Facebook, and the 20% Statistician blog, and 22 people expressed interest. On May 15th, we randomly selected five volunteers based on five areas of expertise: Åse Innes-Ker (affective science), Nicholas James (design/methods), Ingrid Aulike (statistics), Melissa Kline (computational reproducibility), and Tiago Lubiana (wildcard category). The Red Team was then given three weeks to report errors.
Our Red Team project was somewhat similar to traditional peer review, except that we 1) compensated Red Team members’ time with a $200 stipend, 2) explicitly asked the Red Teamers to identify errors in any part of the project (i.e., not just writing), 3) gave the Red Team full access to the materials, data, and code, and 4) provided financial incentives for identifying critical errors (a donation to the GiveWell charity non-profit for each unique “critical error” discovered).
The Red Team submitted 107 error reports. Ruben Arslan–who helped inspire this project with his BugBountyProgram–served as the neutral arbiter. Ruben examined the reports, evaluated the authors’ responses, and ultimately decided whether an issue was “critical” (see this post for Ruben’s reflection on the Red Team Challenge) Of the 107 reports, Ruben concluded that there were 18 unique critical issues (for details, see this project page). Ruben decided that any major issues that potentially invalidated inferences were worth $100, minor issues related to computational reproducibility were worth $20, and minor issues that could be resolved without much work were worth $10. After three weeks, the total final donation was $660. The Red Team detected 5 major errors. These included two previously unknown limitations of a key manipulation, inadequacies in the design and description of the power analysis, an incorrectly reported statistical test in the supplemental materials, and a lack of information about the sample in the manuscript. Minor issues concerned reproducibility of code and clarifications about the procedure.
After receiving this feedback, Nicholas Coles and his co-authors decided to hold off submitting their manuscript (see this post for Nicholas’ personal reflection). They are currently conducting a new study to address some of the issues raised by the Red Team.
We consider this to be a feasibility study of whether a Red Team approach is practical and worthwhile. So, based on this study, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions about a Red Team approach in science except one: it can be done.
That said, our study does provide some food for thought. Many people were eager to join the Red Team. The study’s corresponding author, Nicholas Coles, was graciously willing to acknowledge issues when they were pointed out. And it was obvious that, had these issues been pointed out earlier, the study would have been substantially improved before being carried out. These findings make us optimistic that Red Teams can be useful and feasible to implement.
In an earlier column, the issue was raised that rewarding Red Team members with co-authorship on the subsequent paper would create a conflict of interest — too severe criticism on the paper might make the paper unpublishable. So, instead, we paid each Red Teamer $200 for their service. We wanted to reward people for their time. We did not want to reward them only for finding issues because, before we knew that 19 unique issues would be found, we were naively worried that the Red Team might find few things wrong with the paper. In interviews with Red Team members, it became clear that the charitable donations for each issue were not a strong motivator. Instead, people were just happy to detect issues for decent pay. They didn’t think that they deserved authorship for their work, and several Red Team members didn’t consider authorship on an academic paper to be valuable, given their career goals.
After talking with the Red Team members, we started to think that certain people might enjoy Red Teaming as a job – it is challenging, requires skills, and improves science. This opens up the possibility of a freelance services marketplace (such as Fiverr) for error detection, where Red Team members are hired at an hourly rate and potentially rewarded for finding errors. It should be feasible to hire people to check for errors at each phase of a project, depending on their expertise and reputation as good error-detectors. If researchers do not have money for such a service, they might be able to set up a volunteer network where people “Red Team” each other’s projects. It could also be possible for universities to create Red Teams (e.g., Cornell University has a computational reproducibility service that researchers can hire).
As scientists, we should ask ourselves when, and for which type of studies, we want to invest time and/or money to make sure that published work is as free from errors as possible. As we continue to consider ways to increase the reliability of science, a Red Team approach might be something to further explore.
Red Team Challenge
by Nicholas A. Coles, Leo Tiokhin, Ruben Arslan, Patrick Forscher, Anne Scheel, & Daniël Lakens
All else equal, scientists should trust studies and theories that have been more critically evaluated. The more that a scientific product has been exposed to processes designed to detect flaws, the more that researchers can trust the product (Lakens, 2019; Mayo, 2018). Yet, there are barriers to adopting critical approaches in science. Researchers are susceptible to biases, such as confirmation bias, the “better than average” effect, and groupthink. Researchers may gain a competitive advantage for jobs, funding, and promotions by sacrificing rigor in order to produce larger quantities of research (Heesen, 2018; Higginson & Munafò, 2016) or to win priority races (Tiokhin & Derex, 2019). And even if researchers were transparent enough to allow others to critically examine their materials, code, and ideas, there is little incentive for others–including peer reviewers–to do so. These combined factors may hinder the ability of science to detect errors and self-correct (Vazire, 2019).
Today we announce an initiative that we hope can incentivize critical feedback and error detection in science: the Red Team Challenge. Daniël Lakens and Leo Tiokhin are offering a total of $3,000 for five individuals to provide critical feedback on the materials, code, and ideas in the forthcoming preprint titled “Are facial feedback effects solely driven by demand characteristics? An experimental investigation”. This preprint examines the role of demand characteristics in research on the controversial facial feedback hypothesis: the idea that an individual’s facial expressions can influence their emotions. This is a project that Coles and colleagues will submit for publication in parallel with the Red Team Challenge. We hope that challenge will serve as a useful case study of the role Red Teams might play in science.
We are looking for five individuals to join “The Red Team”. Unlike traditional peer review, this Red Team will receive financial incentives to identify problems. Each Red Team member will receive a $200 stipend to find problems, including (but not limited to) errors in the experimental design, materials, code, analyses, logic, and writing. In addition to these stipends, we will donate $100 to a GoodWell top ranked charity (maximum total donations: $2,000) for every new “critical problem” detected by a Red Team member. Defining a “critical problem” is subjective, but a neutral arbiter–Ruben Arslan–will make these decisions transparently. At the end of the challenge, we will release: (1) the names of the Red Team members (if they wish to be identified), (2) a summary of the Red Team’s feedback, (3) how much each Red Team member raised for charity, and (4) the authors’ responses to the Red Team’s feedback.
For us, this is a fun project for several reasons. Some of us are just interested in the feasibility of Red Team challenges in science (Lakens, 2020). Others want feedback about how to make such challenges more scientifically useful and to develop best practices. And some of us (mostly Nick) are curious to see what good and bad might come from throwing their project into the crosshairs of financially-incentivized research skeptics. Regardless of our diverse motivations, we’re united by a common interest: improving science by recognizing and rewarding criticism (Vazire, 2019).
References
Heesen, R. (2018). Why the reward structure of science makes reproducibility problems inevitable. The Journal of Philosophy, 115(12), 661-674.
Higginson, A. D., & Munafò, M. R. (2016). Current incentives for scientists lead to underpowered studies with erroneous conclusions. PLoS Biology, 14(11), e2000995.
Lakens, D. (2019). The value of preregistration for psychological science: A conceptual analysis. Japanese Psychological Review.
Mayo, D. G. (2018). Statistical inference as severe testing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tiokhin, L., & Derex, M. (2019). Competition for novelty reduces information sampling in a research game-a registered report. Royal Society Open Science, 6(5), 180934.
Vazire, S. (2019). A toast to the error detectors. Nature, 577(9).
Effect Sizes and Power for Interactions in ANOVA Designs
What’s a family in family-wise error control?
When you perform multiple comparisons in a study, you need to control your alpha level for multiple comparisons. It is generally recommended to control for the family-wise error rate, but there is some confusion about what a ‘family’ is. As Bretz, Hothorn, & Westfall (2011) write in their excellent book “Multiple Comparisons Using R” on page 15: “The appropriate choice of null hypotheses being of primary interest is a controversial question. That is, it is not always clear which set of hypotheses should constitute the family H1,…,Hm. This topic has often been in dispute and there is no general consensus.” In one of the best papers on controlling for multiple comparisons out there, Bender & Lange (2001) write: “Unfortunately, there is no simple and unique answer to when it is appropriate to control which error rate. Different persons may have different but nevertheless reasonable opinions. In addition to the problem of deciding which error rate should be under control, it has to be defined first which tests of a study belong to one experiment.” The Wikipedia page on family-wise error rate is a mess.
But let’s get back to our first problem, which we can solve by making the claims people need to control Type 1 error rates for less vague. Lisa DeBruine and I recently proposed machine readable hypothesis tests to remove any ambiguity in the tests we will perform to examine statistical predictions, and when we will consider a claim corroborated or falsified. In this post, I am going to use our R package ‘scienceverse’ to clarify what constitutes a family of tests when controlling the family-wise error rate.
An example of formalizing family-wise error control
Evaluation of Statistical Hypotheses
12 March, 2020
Simulating Null Effects Postregistration
Results
Hypothesis 1: H1
Something will happen
p_t_1
is confirmed if analysis ttest_1 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.452 (FALSE)
p_t_2
is confirmed if analysis ttest_2 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.21 (FALSE)
p_t_3
is confirmed if analysis ttest_3 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.02 (TRUE)
Corroboration ( TRUE )
The hypothesis is corroborated if anything is significant.
p_t_1 | p_t_2 | p_t_3
Falsification ( FALSE )
The hypothesis is falsified if nothing is significant.
!p_t_1 & !p_t_2 & !p_t_3
All criteria were met for corroboration.
We see the hypothesis that ‘something will happen’ is corroborated, because there was a significant difference on dv3 – even though this was a Type 1 error, since we simulated data with a true effect size of 0 – and any difference was taken as support for the prediction. With a 5% alpha level, we will observe 1-(1-0.05)^3 = 14.26% Type 1 errors in the long run. This Type 1 error inflation can be prevented by lowering the alpha level, for example by a Bonferroni correction (0.05/3), after which the expected Type 1 error rate is 4.92% (see Bretz et al., 2011, for more advanced techniques to control error rates). When we examine the report for the second scenario, where each dv tests a unique hypothesis, we get the following output from scienceverse:
Evaluation of Statistical Hypotheses
12 March, 2020
Simulating Null Effects Postregistration
Results
Hypothesis 1: H1
dv1 will show an effect
p_t_1
is confirmed if analysis ttest_1 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.452 (FALSE)
Corroboration ( FALSE )
The hypothesis is corroborated if dv1 is significant.
p_t_1
Falsification ( TRUE )
The hypothesis is falsified if dv1 is not significant.
!p_t_1
All criteria were met for falsification.
Hypothesis 2: H2
dv2 will show an effect
p_t_2
is confirmed if analysis ttest_2 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.21 (FALSE)
Corroboration ( FALSE )
The hypothesis is corroborated if dv2 is significant.
p_t_2
Falsification ( TRUE )
The hypothesis is falsified if dv2 is not significant.
!p_t_2
All criteria were met for falsification.
Hypothesis 3: H3
dv3 will show an effect
p_t_3
is confirmed if analysis ttest_3 yieldsp.value<0.05
The result was p.value = 0.02 (TRUE)
Corroboration ( TRUE )
The hypothesis is corroborated if dv3 is significant.
p_t_3
Falsification ( FALSE )
The hypothesis is falsified if dv3 is not significant.
!p_t_3
All criteria were met for corroboration.
We now see that two hypotheses were falsified (yes, yes, I know you should not use p > 0.05 to falsify a prediction in real life, and this part of the example is formally wrong so I don’t also have to explain equivalence testing to readers not familiar with it – if that is you, read this, and know scienceverse will allow you to specify equivalence test as the criterion to falsify a prediction, see the example here). The third hypothesis is corroborated, even though, as above, this is a Type 1 error.
It might seem that the second approach, specifying each dv as it’s own hypothesis, is the way to go if you do not want to lower the alpha level to control for multiple comparisons. But take a look at the report of the study you have performed. You have made 3 predictions, of which 1 was corroborated. That is not an impressive success rate. Sure, mixed results happen, and you should interpret results not just based on the p-value (but on the strength of the experimental design, assumptions about power, your prior, the strength of the theory, etc.) but if these predictions were derived from the same theory, this set of results is not particularly impressive. Since researchers can never selectively report only those results that ‘work’ because this would be a violation of the code of research integrity, we should always be able to see the meager track record of predictions.If you don’t feel ready to make a specific predictions (and run the risk of sullying your track record) either do unplanned exploratory tests, and do not make claims based on their results, or preregister all possible tests you can think of, and massively lower your alpha level to control error rates (for example, genome-wide association studies sometimes use an alpha level of 5 x 10–8 to control the Type 1 erorr rate).
Thanks to Lisa DeBruine for feedback on an earlier draft of this blog post.
Review of "Do Effect Sizes in Psychology Laboratory Experiments Mean Anything in Reality?"
Researchers spend a lot of time reviewing papers. These reviews are rarely made public. Sometimes reviews might be useful for readers of an article. Here, I’m sharing my review of “Do Effect Sizes in Psychology Laboratory Experiments Mean Anything in Reality?“ by Roy Baumeister. I reviewed this (blinded) manuscript in December 2019 for a journal where it was rejected January 8 based on 2 reviews. Below you can read the review as I submitted it. I am sharing this review because the paper was accepted at another journal.
In this opinion piece the authors try to argue for the lack of theoretical meaning of effect sizes in psychology. The opinion piece makes a point I think most reasonable people already agreed upon (social psychology makes largely ordinal predictions). The question is how educational and well argued their position is that this means effect sizes are theoretically not that important. On that aspect, I found the paper relatively weak. Too many statements are overly simplistic and the text is far behind on the state of the art (it reads as if it was written 20 years ago). I think a slightly brushed up version might make a relatively trivial but generally educational point for anyone not up to speed on this topic. If the author put in a bit more effort to have a discussion that incorporates the state of the art, this could be a more nuanced piece that has a bit stronger analysis of the issues at play, and a bit more vision about where to go. I think the latter would be worth reading for a general audience at this journal.
1) What is the real reason our theories do not predict effect sizes?
2) When is something an ordinal prediction?
3) Standardized vs unstandardized effect sizes
Minor points
Review of "The Generalizability Crisis" by Tal Yarkoni
First, I agree with Yarkoni that almost all the proposals he makes in the section “Where to go from here?” are good suggestions. I don’t think they follow logically from his points about generalizability, as I detail below, but they are nevertheless solid suggestions a researcher should consider. Second, I agree that there are research lines in psychology where modelling more things as random factors will be productive, and a forceful manifesto (even if it is slightly less practical than similar earlier papers) might be a wake up call for people who had ignored this issue until now.
Beyond these two points of agreement, I found the main thesis in his article largely unconvincing. I don’t think there is a generalizability crisis, but the article is a nice illustration of why philosophers like Popper abandoned the idea of an inductive science. When Yarkoni concludes that “A direct implication of the arguments laid out above is that a huge proportion of the quantitative inferences drawn in the published psychology literature are so inductively weak as to be at best questionable and at worst utterly insensible.” I am primarily surprised he believes induction is a defensible philosophy of science. There is a very brief discussion of views by Popper, Meehl, and Mayo on page 19, but their work on testing theories is proposed as a probable not feasible solution – which is peculiar, because these authors would probably disagree with most of the points made by Yarkoni, and I would expect at least somewhere in the paper a discussion comparing induction against the deductive approach (especially since the deductive approach is arguably the dominant approach in psychology, and therefore none of the generalizability issues raised by Yarkoni are a big concern). Because I believe the article starts from a faulty position (scientists are not concerned with induction, but use deductive approaches) and because Yarkoni provides no empirical support for any of his claims that generalizability has led to huge problems (such as incredibly high Type 1 error rates), I remain unconvinced there is anything remotely close to the generalizability crisis he so evocatively argues for. The topic addressed by Yarkoni is very broad. It probably needs a book length treatment to do it justice. My review is already way too long, and I did not get into the finer details of the argument. But I hope this review helps to point out the parts of the manuscript where I feel important arguments lack a solid foundation, and where issues that deserve to be discussed are ignored.
Point 1: “Fast” and “slow” approaches need some grounding in philosophy of science.
Early in the introduction, Yarkoni says there is a “fast” and “slow” approach of drawing general conclusions from specific observations. Whenever people use words that don’t exactly describe what they mean, putting them in quotation marks is generally not a good idea. The “fast” and “slow” approaches he describes are not, I believe upon closer examination, two approaches “of drawing general conclusions from specific observations”.
The difference is actually between induction (the “slow” approach of generalizing from single observations to general observations) and deduction, as proposed by for example Popper. As Popper writes “According to the view that will be put forward here, the method of critically testing theories, and selecting them according to the results of tests, always proceeds on the following lines. From a new idea, put up tentatively, and not yet justified in any way—an anticipation, a hypothesis, a theoretical system, or what you will—conclusions are drawn by means of logical deduction.”
Yarkoni incorrectly suggests that “upon observing that a particular set of subjects rated a particular set of vignettes as more morally objectionable when primed with a particular set of cleanliness-related words than with a particular set of neutral words, one might draw the extremely broad conclusion that ‘cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments’”. This reverses the scientific process as proposed by Popper, which is (as several people have argued, see below) the dominant approach to knowledge generation in psychology. The authors are not concluding that “cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments” from their data. This would be induction. Instead, they are positing that “cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments”, they collected data and performed and empirical test, and found their hypothesis was corroborated. In other words, the hypothesis came first. It is not derived from the data – the hypothesis is what led them to collect the data.
Yarkoni deviates from what is arguably the common approach in psychological science, and suggests induction might actually work: “Eventually, if the e?ect is shown to hold when systematically varying a large number of other experimental factors, one may even earn the right to summarize the results of a few hundred studies by stating that “cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments””. This approach to science flies right in the face of Popper (1959/2002, p. 10), who says: “I never assume that we can argue from the truth of singular statements to the truth of theories. I never assume that by force of ‘verified’ conclusions, theories can be established as ‘true’, or even as merely ‘probable’.” Similarly, Lakatos (1978, p. 2) writes: “One can today easily demonstrate that there can be no valid derivation of a law of nature from any finite number of facts; but we still keep reading about scientific theories being proved from facts. Why this stubborn resistance to elementary logic?” I am personally on the side of Popper and Lakatos, but regardless of my preferences, Yarkoni needs to provide some argument his inductive approach to science has any possibility of being a success, preferably by embedding his views in some philosophy of science. I would also greatly welcome learning why Popper and Lakatos are wrong. Such an argument, which would overthrow the dominant model of knowledge generation in psychology, could be impactful, although a-priori I doubt it will be very successful.
Point 2: Titles are not evidence for psychologist’s tendency to generalize too quickly.
This is a minor point, but I think a good illustration of the weakness of some of the main arguments that are made in the paper. On the second page, Yarkoni argues that “the vast majority of psychological scientists have long operated under a regime of (extremely) fast generalization”. I don’t know about the vast majority of scientists, but Yarkoni himself is definitely using fast generalization. He looked through a single journal, and found 3 titles that made general statements (e.g., “Inspiration Encourages Belief in God”). When I downloaded and read this article, I noticed the discussion contains a ‘constraint on generalizability’ in the discussion, following (Simons et al., 2017). The authors wrote: “We identify two possible constraints on generality. First, we tested our ideas only in American and Korean samples. Second, we found that inspiring events that encourage feelings of personal insignificance may undermine these effects.”. Is Yarkoni not happy with these two sentence clearly limiting the generalizability in the discussion?
For me, this observation raised serious concerns about the statement Yarkoni makes that, simply from the titles of scientific articles, we can make a statement about whether authors make ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ generalizations. One reason is that Yarkoni examined titles from a scientific article that adheres to the publication manual of the APA. In the section on titles, the APA states: “A title should summarize the main idea of the manuscript simply and, if possible, with style. It should be a concise statement of the main topic and should identify the variables or theoretical issues under investigation and the relationship between them. An example of a good title is “Effect of Transformed Letters on Reading Speed.””. To me, it seems the authors are simply following the APA publication manual. I do not think their choice for a title provides us with any insight whatsoever about the tendency of authors to have a preference for ‘fast’ generalization. Again, this might be a minor point, but I found this an illustrative example of the strength of arguments in other places (see the next point for the most important example). Yarkoni needs to make a case that scientists are overgeneralizing, for there to be a generalizability crisis – but he does so unconvincingly. I sincerely doubt researchers expect their findings to generalize to all possible situations mentioned in the title, I doubt scientists believe titles are the place to accurately summarize limits of generalizability, and I doubt Yarkoni has made a strong point that psychologists overgeneralize based on this section. More empirical work would be needed to build a convincing case (e.g., code how researchers actually generalize their findings in a random selection of 250 articles, taking into account Gricean communication norms (especially the cooperative principle) in scientific articles).
Point 3: Theories and tests are not perfectly aligned in deductive approaches.
After explaining that psychologists use statistics to test predictions based on experiments that are operationalizations of verbal theories, Yarkoni notes: “From a generalizability standpoint, then, the key question is how closely the verbal and quantitative expressions of one’s hypothesis align with each other.”
Yarkoni writes: “When a researcher verbally expresses a particular hypothesis, she is implicitly defining a set of admissible observations containing all of the hypothetical situations in which some measurement could be taken that would inform that hypothesis. If the researcher subsequently asserts that a particular statistical procedure provides a suitable test of the verbal hypothesis, she is making the tacit but critical assumption that the universe of admissible observations implicitly defined by the chosen statistical procedure (in concert with the experimental design, measurement model, etc.) is well aligned with the one implicitly defined by the qualitative hypothesis. Should a discrepancy between the two be discovered, the researcher will then face a choice between (a) working to resolve the discrepancy in some way (i.e., by modifying either the verbal statement of the hypothesis or the quantitative procedure(s) meant to provide an operational parallel); or (b) giving up on the link between the two and accepting that the statistical procedure does not inform the verbal hypothesis in a meaningful way.”
I highlighted what I think is the critical point is in a bold font. To generalize from a single observation to a general theory through induction, the sample and the test should represent the general theory. This is why Yarkoni is arguing that there has to be a direct correspondence between the theoretical model, and the statistical test. This is true in induction.
If I want to generalize beyond my direct observations, which are rarely sampled randomly from all possible factors that might impact my estimate, I need to account for uncertainty in the things I have not observed. As Yarkoni clearly explains, one does this by adding random factors to a model. He writes (p. 7) “Each additional random factor one adds to a model licenses generalization over a corresponding population of potential measurements, expanding the scope of inference beyond only those measurements that were actually obtained. However, adding random factors to one’s model also typically increases the uncertainty with which the fixed e?ects of interest are estimated”. You don’t need to read Popper to see the problem here – if you want to generalize to all possible random factors, there are so many of them, you will never be able to overcome the uncertainty and learn anything. This is why inductive approaches to science have largely been abandoned. As Yarkoni accurately summarizes based on an large multi-lab study on verbal overshadowing by Alogna: “given very conservative background assumptions, the massive Alogna et al. study—an initiative that drew on the efforts of dozens of researchers around the world—does not tell us much about the general phenomenon of verbal overshadowing. Under more realistic assumptions, it tells us essentially nothing.” This is also why Yarkoni’s first practical recommendation on how to move forward is to not solve the problem, but to do something else: “One perfectly reasonable course of action when faced with the difficulty of extracting meaningful, widely generalizable conclusions from e?ects that are inherently complex and highly variable is to opt out of the enterprise entirely.”
This is exactly the reason Popper (among others) rejected induction, and proposed a deductive approach. Why isn’t the alignment between theories and tests raised by Yarkoni a problem for the deductive approach proposed by Popper, Meehl, and Mayo? The reason is that the theory is tentatively posited as true, but in no way believed to be a complete representation of reality. This is an important difference. Yarkoni relies on an inductive approach, and thus the test needs to be aligned with the theory, and the theory defines “a set of admissible observations containing all of the hypothetical situations in which some measurement could be taken that would inform that hypothesis.” For deductive approaches, this is not true.
For philosophers of science like Popper and Lakatos, a theory is not a complete description of reality. Lakatos writes about theories: “Each of them, at any stage of its development, has unsolved problems and undigested anomalies. All theories, in this sense, are born refuted and die refuted.” Lakatos gives the example that Newton’s Principia could not even explain the motion of the moon when it was published. The main point here: All theories are wrong. The fact that all theories (or models) are wrong should not be surprising. Box’s quote “All models are wrong, some are useful” is perhaps best known, but I prefer Box (1976) on parsimony: “Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William Ockham (1285-1349) he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity (Ockham’s knife).” He follows this up by stating “Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad.”
In a deductive approach, the goal of a theoretical model is to make useful predictions. I doubt anyone believes that any of the models they are currently working on is complete. Some researchers might follow an instrumentalist philosophy of science, and don’t expect their theories to be anything more than useful tools. Lakatos’s (1978) main contribution to philosophy of science was to develop a way we deal with our incorrect theories, admitting that all needed adjustment, but some adjustments lead to progressive research lines, and others to degenerative research lines.
In a deductive model, it is perfectly fine to posit a theory that eating ice-cream makes people happy, without assuming this holds for all flavors, across all cultures, at all temperatures, and is irrespective of the amount of ice-cream eaten previously, and many other factors. After all, it is just a tentatively model that we hope is simple enough to be useful, and that we expect to become more complex as we move forward. As we increase our understanding of food preferences, we might be able to modify our theory, so that it is still simple, but also allows us to predict the fact that eggnog and bacon flavoured ice-cream do not increase happiness (on average). The most important thing is that our theory is tentative, and posited to allow us to make good predictions. As long as the theory is useful, and we have no alternatives to replace it with, the theory will continue to be used – without any expectation that is will generalize to all possible situations. As Box (1976) writes: “Matters of fact can lead to a tentative theory. Deductions from this tentative theory may be found to be discrepant with certain known or specially acquired facts. These discrepancies can then induce a modified, or in some cases a different, theory.” A discussion of this large gap between Yarkoni and deductive approaches proposed by Popper and Meehl, where Yarkoni thinks theories and tests need to align, and deductive approaches see theories as tentative and wrong, should be included, I think.
Point 4: The dismissal of risky predictions is far from convincing (and generalizability is typically a means to risky predictions, not a goal in itself).
If we read Popper (but also on the statistical side the work of Neyman) we see induction as a possible goal in science is clearly rejected. Yarkoni mentions deductive approaches briefly in his section on adopting better standards, in the sub-section on making riskier predictions. I intuitively expected this section to be crucial – after all, it finally turns to those scholars who would vehemently disagree with most of Yarkoni’s arguments in the preceding sections – but I found this part rather disappointing. Strangely enough, Yarkoni simply proposes predictions as a possible solution – but since the deductive approach goes directly against the inductive approach proposed by Yarkoni, it seems very weird to just mention risky predictions as one possible solution, when it is actually a completely opposite approach that rejects most of what Yarkoni argues for. Yarkoni does not seem to believe that the deductive mode proposed by Popper, Meehl, and Mayo, a hypothesis testing approach that is arguably the dominant approach in most of psychology (Cortina & Dunlap, 1997; Dienes, 2008; Hacking, 1965), has a lot of potential. The reason he doubts severe tests of predictions will be useful is that “in most domains of psychology, there are pervasive and typically very plausible competing explanations for almost every finding” (Yarkoni, p. 19). This could be resolved if risky predictions were possible, which Yarkoni doubts.
Yarkoni’s criticism on the possibility of severe tests is regrettably weak. Yarkoni says that “Unfortunately, in most domains of psychology, there are pervasive and typically very plausible competing explanations for almost every finding.” From his references (Cohen, Lykken, Meehl) we can see he refers to the crud factor, or the idea that the null hypothesis is always false. As we recently pointed out in a review paper on crud (Orben & Lakens, 2019), Meehl and Lykken disagreed about the definition of the crud factor, the evidence of crud in some datasets can not be generalized to all studies in pychology, and “The lack of conceptual debate and empirical research about the crud factor has been noted by critics who disagree with how some scientists treat the crud factor as an “axiom that needs no testing” (Mulaik, Raju, & Harshman, 1997).”. Altogether, I am very unconvinced by this cursory reference to crud makes a convincing point that “there are pervasive and typically very plausible competing explanations for almost every finding”. Risky predictions seem possible, to me, and demonstrating the generalizability of findings is actually one way to perform a severe test.
When Yarkoni discusses risky predictions, he sticks to risky quantitative predictions. As explained in Lakens (2020), “Making very narrow range predictions is a way to make it statistically likely to falsify your prediction if it is wrong. But the severity of a test is determined by all characteristics of a study that increases the capability of a prediction to be wrong, if it is wrong. For example, by predicting you will only observe a statistically significant difference from zero in a hypothesis test if a very specific set of experimental conditions is met that all follow from a single theory, it is possible to make theoretically risky predictions.” I think the reason most psychologists perform studies that demonstrate the generalizability of their findings has nothing to do with their desire to inductively build a theory from all these single observations. They show the findings generalize, because it increases the severity of their tests. In other words, according to this deductive approach, generalizability is not a goal in itself, but a it follows from the goal to perform severe tests. It is unclear to me why Yarkoni does not think that approaches such as triangulation (Munafò & Smith, 2018) are severe tests. I think these approaches are the driving force between many of the more successful theories in social psychology (e.g., social identity theory), and it works fine.
Generalization as a means to severely test a prediction is common, and one of the goals of direct replications (generalizing to new samples) and conceptual replications (generalizing to different procedures). Yarkoni might disagree with me that generalization serves severity, not vice versa. But then what is missing from the paper is a solid argument why people would want to generalize to begin with, assuming at least a decent number of them do not believe in induction. The inherent conflict between the deductive approaches and induction is also not explained in a satisfactory manner.
Point 5: Why care about statistical inferences, if these do not relate to sweeping verbal conclusions?
If we ignore all points previous points, we can still read Yarkoni’s paper as a call to introduce more random factors in our experiments. This nicely complements recent calls to vary all factors you do not thing should change the conclusions you draw (Baribault et al., 2018), and classic papers on random effects (Barr et al., 2013; Clark, 1969; Cornfield & Tukey, 1956).
Yarkoni generalizes from the fact that most scientists model subjects as a random factor, and then asks why scientists generalize to all sorts of other factors that were not in their models. He asks “Why not simply model all experimental factors, including subjects, as fixed e?ects”. It might be worth noting in the paper that sometimes researchers model subjects as fixed effects. For example, Fujisaki and Nishida (2009) write: “Participants were the two authors and five paid volunteers” and nowhere in their analyses do they assume there is any meaningful or important variation across individuals. In many perception studies, an eye is an eye, and an ear is an ear – whether from the author, or a random participant dragged into the lab from the corridor.
In other research areas, we do model individuals as a random factor. Yarkoni says we model stimuli as a random factor because: “The reason we model subjects as random e?ects is not that such a practice is objectively better, but rather, that this specification more closely aligns the meaning of the quantitative inference with the meaning of the qualitative hypothesis we’re interested in evaluating”. I disagree. I think we model certain factor as random effects because we have a high prior these factors influence the effect, and leaving them out of the model would reduce the strength of our prediction. Leaving them out reduces the probability a test will show we are wrong, if we are wrong. It impacts the severity of the test. Whether or not we need to model factors (e.g., temperature, the experimenter, or day of the week) as random factors because not doing so reduces the severity of a test is a subjective judgments. Research fields need to decide for themselves. It is very well possible more random factors are generally needed, but I don’t know how many, and doubt it will ever be as severe are the ‘generalizability crisis’ suggests. If it is as severe as Yarkoni suggests, some empirical demonstrations of this would be nice. Clark (1973) showed his language-as-fixed-effect fallacy using real data. Barr et al (2013) similarly made their point based on real data. I currently do not find the theoretical point very strong, but real data might convince me otherwise.
The issues about including random factors is discussed in a more complete, and importantly, applicable, manner in Barr et al (2013). Yarkoni remains vague on which random factors should be included and which not, and just recommends ‘more expansive’ models. I have no idea when this is done satisfactory. This is a problem with extreme arguments like the one Yarkoni puts forward. It is fine in theory to argue your test should align with whatever you want to generalize to, but in practice, it is impossible. And in the end, statistics is just a reasonably limited toolset that tries to steer people somewhat in the right direction. The discussion in Barr et al (2013), which includes trade-offs between converging models (which Yarkoni too easily dismisses as solved by modern computational power – it is not solved) and including all possible factors, and interactions between all possible factors, is a bit more pragmatic. Similarly, Cornfield & Tukey (1956) more pragmatically list options ranging from ignoring factors altogether, to randomizing them, or including them as a factor, and note “Each of these attitudes is appropriate in its place. In every experiment there are many variables which could enter, and one of the great skills of the experimenter lies in leaving out only inessential ones.” Just as pragmatically, Clark (1973) writes: “The wide-spread capitulation to the language-as-fixed-effect fallacy, though alarming, has probably not been disastrous. In the older established areas, most experienced investigators have acquired a good feel for what will replicate on a new language sample and what will not. They then design their experiments accordingly.” As always, it is easy to argue for extremes in theory, but this is generally uninteresting for an applied researcher. It would be great if Yarkoni could provide something a bit more pragmatic about what to do in practice than his current recommendation about fitting “more expansive models” – and provides some indication where to stop, or at least suggestions what an empirical research program would look like that tells us where to stop, and why. In some ways, Yarkoni’s point generalizes the argument that most findings in psychology do not generalize to non-WEIRD populations (Henrich et al., 2010), and it has the same weakness. WEIRD is a nice acronym, but it is just a completely random collection of 5 factors that might limit generalizability. The WEIRD acronym functions more as a nice reminder that boundary conditions exist, but it does not allow us to predict when they exist, or when they matter enough to be included in our theories. Currently, there is a gap between the factors that in theory could matter, and the factors that we should in practice incorporate. Maybe it is my pragmatic nature, but without such a discussion, I think the paper offers relatively little progress compared to previous discussions about generalizability (of which there are plenty).
Conclusion
A large part of Yarkoni’s argument is based on the fact that theories and tests should be closely aligned, while in a deductive approach based on severe tests of predictions, models are seen as simple, tentative, and wrong, and this is not considered a problem. Yarkoni does not convincingly argue researchers want to generalize extremely broadly (although I agree papers would benefit from including Constraints on Generalizability statements a proposed by Simons and colleagues (2017), but mainly because this improves falsifiability, not because it improves induction), and even if there is the tendency to overclaim in articles, I do not think this leads to an inferential crisis. Previous authors have made many of the same points, but in a more pragmatic manner (e.g., Barr et al., 2013m Clark, 1974,). Yarkoni fails to provide any insights into where the balance between generalizing to everything, and generalizing to factors that matter, should lie, nor does he provide an evaluation of how far off this balance research areas are. It is easy to argue any specific approach to science will not work in theory – but it is much more difficult to convincingly argue it does not work in practice. Until Yarkoni does the latter convincingly, I don’t think the generalizability crisis as he sketches it is something that will keep me up at night.
References
Baribault, B., Donkin, C., Little, D. R., Trueblood, J. S., Oravecz, Z., Ravenzwaaij, D. van, White, C. N., Boeck, P. D., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2018). Metastudies for robust tests of theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(11), 2607–2612. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708285114
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001
Box, G. E. (1976). Science and statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71(356), 791–799. https://doi.org/10/gdm28w
Clark, H. H. (1969). Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning. Psychological Review, 76(4), 387–404. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0027578
Cornfield, J., & Tukey, J. W. (1956). Average Values of Mean Squares in Factorials. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 27(4), 907–949. https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177728067
Cortina, J. M., & Dunlap, W. P. (1997). On the logic and purpose of significance testing. Psychological Methods, 2(2), 161.
Dienes, Z. (2008). Understanding psychology as a science: An introduction to scientific and statistical inference. Palgrave Macmillan.
Fujisaki, W., & Nishida, S. (2009). Audio–tactile superiority over visuo–tactile and audio–visual combinations in the temporal resolution of synchrony perception. Experimental Brain Research, 198(2), 245–259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1870-x
Hacking, I. (1965). Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge University Press.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). Most people are not WEIRD. Nature, 466(7302), 29–29.
Lakens, D. (2020). The Value of Preregistration for Psychological Science: A Conceptual Analysis. Japanese Psychological Review. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jbh4w
Munafò, M. R., & Smith, G. D. (2018). Robust research needs many lines of evidence. Nature, 553(7689), 399–401. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-01023-3
Orben, A., & Lakens, D. (2019). Crud (Re)defined. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/96dpy
Simons, D. J., Shoda, Y., & Lindsay, D. S. (2017). Constraints on Generality (COG): A Proposed Addition to All Empirical Papers. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(6), 1123–1128. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617708630
Observed Type 1 Error Rates (Why Statistical Models are Not Reality)
Now maybe a single paper with 30 tests is not ‘long runnerish’ enough. What we really want to control the Type 1 error rate of is the literature, past, present, and future. Except, we will never read the literature. So let’s assume we are interested in a meta-analysis worth of 200 studies that examine a topic where the true effect size is 0 for each test. We can plot the frequency of Type 1 error rates for 1 million sets of 200 tests.
Statistical models are not reality.
Code
For a related paper on alpha levels that in practical situations can not be 5%, see https://psyarxiv.com/erwvk/ by Casper Albers.
Do You Really Want to Test a Hypothesis?
The Value of Preregistration for Psychological Science: A Conceptual Analysis
What is Preregistration For?
When is preregistration valuable?
Improving Your Statistical Questions
Three years after launching my first massive open online course (MOOC) ‘Improving Your Statistical Inferences’ on Coursera, today I am happy to announce a second completely free online course called ‘Improving Your Statistical Questions’. My first course is a collection of lessons about statistics and methods that we commonly use, but that I wish I had known how to use better when I was taking my first steps into empirical research. My new course is a collection of lessons about statistics and methods that we do not yet commonly use, but that I wish we start using to improve the questions we ask. Where the first course tries to get people up to speed about commonly accepted best practices, my new course tries to educate researchers about better practices. Most of the modules consist of topics in which there has been more recent developments, or at least increasing awareness, over the last 5 years.
Improving Education about P-values
Requiring high-powered studies from scientists with resource constraints
This blog post is now included in the paper “Sample size justification” available at PsyArXiv.
Calculating Confidence Intervals around Standard Deviations