Y’know, it’s funny, I didn’t look at the study or look into it (because no one has the time to read every study reported to them) but as soon as you said bad statistics and p-hacking, I instantly zeroed in on who you were talking about. I thought, “Oh yeah, the power pose researcher.” That should not happen. I shouldn’t have been able to guess so quickly who you’re talking about since I’m terrible with names and she’s outside my field. That rapid association is solely because I’ve seen so much reactionary crap about how social psychology is bullshit her research has become the posterchild. She’s being scapegoated for the failings of a whole field in a way that’s unfair. People who know nothing about the field but have decided to have strong feelings about it tend to pick her, because she’s the only example they can think of.
This isn’t to say that social psychology isn’t facing a replication crisis, or that Cuddy’s power pose research wasn’t flawed, but to say that she’s “notorious for” her use of bad statistics is really to say that she became famous for one episode of bad statistics. This is less predictive of the reproducibility of this research than you’re implying. Unless you know about her other research and what else she’s p-hacked or have some evidence of habitual data manipulation. If not, I’d consider interrogating why you believe that it is a
And whether that belief is held to bolster a bigger position on the value of social psychology as a field. That suggestion is predicated on a set of assumptions about where you’re getting your information (very similar to where I get mine, that’s not a value judgement) , and on the assumption that you’re not a social scientist yourself. For all I know you do in fact have deeper context on Cuddy, but otherwise I think she’s getting a raw deal from having one bad idea. And of course, she could still be wrong on this, but the idea seems to have wriggled out of a lot of the articles on social psychology that it is inherently not reproducible, and that’s not really the correct takeaway.
