something novel and flashy to report. A paper describing a failed experiment – even if this negative result is scientifically significant – is unlikely to find a home in a professional journal. The bias for positive results encourages the researcher to tweak the data until it yields anything that looks like new information. Social scientists look at a mound of data like the boy in the old joke... “There must be a pony in there somewhere.” Surveys have shown that published studies in social psychology are five times more likely to show positive results – that is, to confirm the experimenter’s hypothesis – than studies in the physical sciences. This means one of two things. Either social science researchers are the smartest and luckiest researchers in the history of experiments, or something has gone very wrong. STUDIES IN KIDDIELAND The central conceit of social science is that its experiments will yield generally applicable truths about the entire human race. A couple years ago a Canadian economist named Joseph Henrich did the math and found that 70% of published social-science studies are generated in the United States, and that the subjects of more than two-thirds of those studies are exclusively U.S. university undergraduates. College students, Heinrich noted, form “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens.” They are whiter and richer than the general U.S. population, and much whiter and richer than populations of most other countries.
Social scientists boast that social science is the “study of real people in real-life situations.” It’s really the study of college students sitting in psych labs. Social science experiments range from the dubious to the preposterous. Usually the kids are offered a course credit or a bit of cash for their participation. They fill out a questionnaire, respond to images on a screen, or roleplay “real life” situations made up by the scientists. Consider one set of well-known experiments. Together they form, in the words of a New York Times columnist, “an extensive academic critique of the right.” This allegedly scientific enterprise manages to prove that conservatives and Republicans lack compassion and tolerance and are quicker to act unethically than their counterparts on the left. How do we know? Well, here’s how... Several years ago, graduate students at UC Berkeley managed to corral 118 undergraduates for an experiment. They were given course credit or $15 for their cooperation. The subjects bore no resemblance to any wider population. Most were under the age of 21. By definition, all 118 were the kind of kid who goes to Berkeley. Only 3.5% were African-American, and nearly half were Asian-American. (According to Gallup, Asian-Americans are the only ethnic group in which a majority describe themselves as politically liberal.)
The researchers wanted to know how “powerful people” see the world. The researchers asked the kids to fill out a
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