{"id":5132,"date":"2015-05-20T14:51:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T18:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=5132"},"modified":"2015-05-24T15:22:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T19:22:52","slug":"gelman-had-a-sense-about-the-dubious-science-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=5132","title":{"rendered":"Gelman had a sense about the dubious Science article"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE SMART MONEY SENSED SOMETHING WAS UP<\/p>\n

\n\"gl\"<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

As you probably know, the well-known Science article<\/a> on attitudes toward gay marriage by LaCour and Green has been called into question<\/a> (even by its second author<\/a>) and will likely be retracted by the journal.<\/p>\n

We were amazed and impressed to learn today that statistician Andrew Gelman had a sense that something was up with the article soon after it was published. In a December comment in the Washington Post<\/a>, Gelman was flabbergasted by the size of the claimed result:<\/p>\n

What stunned me about these results was not just the effect itself\u2014although I agree that it\u2019s interesting in any case\u2014but the size of the observed differences. They\u2019re huge: an immediate effect of 0.4 on a five-point scale and, after nine months, an effect of 0.8.<\/p>\n

A difference of 0.8 on a five-point scale . . . wow! You rarely see this sort of thing. Just do the math. On a 1-5 scale, the maximum theoretically possible change would be 4. But, considering that lots of people are already at \u201c4\u201d or \u201c5\u201d on the scale, it\u2019s hard to imagine an average change of more than 2. And that would be massive. So we\u2019re talking about a causal effect that\u2019s a full 40% of what is pretty much the maximum change imaginable. Wow, indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

And this got me wondering, how could this happen? After all, it\u2019s hard to change people\u2019s opinions, even if you try really hard. And then these canvassers were getting such amazing results, just by telling a personal story?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

I say all this not to \u201cdebunk\u201d or dismiss LaCour and Green\u2019s work: I think their experiment is really cool, and it\u2019s amazing they found such strong and consistent effects. What I\u2019m trying to do here is understand these findings in light of all the other things we know about public opinion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That said, Gelman didn’t cry foul. He accepted the result as real and tried to come up with reasons why it might have happened. But he sensed something was unusual, even back in December, and we’re quite impressed by that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statistician Andrew Gelman had a sense that something was up with dubious Science article soon after it was published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[1131,1128,222,470,1127,1129,1130,1132,1133,59],"class_list":["post-5132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gossip","category-research-news","tag-change","tag-gay","tag-gelman","tag-green","tag-lacour","tag-marriage","tag-opinion","tag-political","tag-retraction","tag-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LKj-1kM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5132"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5142,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132\/revisions\/5142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}