But probably the most important missing piece is the future. An experiment is merely interesting until time and testing turns its finding into a fact. Scientists know this, and they are trained to react very skeptically to every new paper. They also expect to be greeted with skepticism when they present findings. However, journalists like me, and members of the general public, are often prone to treat every new study as though it represents the last word on the question addressed.
This particular issue was highlighted last week by—wait for it—a new study that tried to reproduce prior psychological studies to see if their findings held up. The result of the three-year initiative is chilling: The team, led by University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, got the same results in only 36 percent of the experiments they replicated.
Despite all the mistakes and overblown claims and criticism and contradictions and arguments—or perhaps because of them—our knowledge of human brains and minds has expanded dramatically during the past century. Psychology and neuroscience have documented phenomena like cognitive dissonance, identified many of the brain structures that support our emotions, and proved the placebo effect and other dimensions of the mind-body connection, among other findings that have been tested over and over again.
These discoveries have helped us understand and treat the true causes of many illnesses. Given the complexities and ambiguities of the scientific endeavor, is it possible for a non-scientist to strike a balance between wholesale dismissal and uncritical belief?
Are there red flags to look for when you read about a study on a site like Greater Good or in a popular self-help book? If you do read one of the actual studies, how should you, as a non-scientist, gauge its credibility?
We came up 10 questions you might ask when you read about the latest scientific findings. These are also questions we ask ourselves, before we cover a study. Peer review—submitting papers to other experts for independent review before acceptance—remains one of the best ways we have for ascertaining the basic seriousness of the study, and many scientists describe peer review as a truly humbling crucible.
Animal experiments tell scientists a lot, but their applicability to our daily human lives will be limited. Similarly, if researchers only studied men, the conclusions might not be relevant to women, and vice versa. In trying to replicate one German study, for example, they had to use different maps ones that would be familiar to University of Virginia students and change a scale measuring aggression to reflect American norms.
This kind of variance could explain the different results. It may also suggest the limits of generalizing the results from one study to other populations not included within that study. Does that mean you should dismiss Western psychology?
Of course not. In general, the more participants in a study, the more valid its results. That said, a large sample is sometimes impossible or even undesirable for certain kinds of studies. This is especially true in expensive neuroscience experiments involving functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scans. And many mindfulness studies have scanned the brains of people with many thousands of hours of meditation experience—a relatively small group.
Even in those cases, however, a study that looks at 30 experienced meditators is probably more solid than a similar one that scanned the brains of only A good researcher tries to compare apples to apples, and control for as many differences as possible in her analysis.
One of the first things to look for in methodology is whether the sample is randomized and involved a control group; this is especially important if a study is to suggest that a certain variable might actually cause a specific outcome, rather than just be correlated with it see next point. If the sample is large enough, randomized trials can produce solid conclusions. Would people still divert a trolley to kill one person in order to save five lives, if their decision killed a real person, instead of just being a thought experiment?
Women, however, were more likely to ask a question when more questions were asked overall during a seminar, and less likely if the first person to ask a question was a man. Some of the reticence is rational from a reputation-preservation perspective: audience members who ask questions can be judged as harshly as the primary speakers of a seminar, says coauthor Alyssa Croft, an assistant social psychology professor at the University of Arizona.
That judgment can be especially harsh for women who, in asking a question, may be perceived as bucking gender norms that say they should be quiet, polite, and agreeable. Though Sotomayor eventually found her footing, for many women, such behavior can have opportunity cost. I felt like, Oh, I have valid ideas. If just by studying this we were able to impact it, that would be a rousing victory for us. The goal is to make our professional meetings more approachable, equitable, and engaging.
Now I raise my hand early on to get out of my comfort zone, and to encourage other people. Those tiny interventions can add up. When a woman asks a question in that kind of a high-stakes setting, it can help validate the yet unspoken ideas of other audience members, too, simply by confirming that someone who looks and sounds like them has presence and power in the field.
Take, for example, the categories of communitive traits versus agentic traits. Communion-related traits, stereotypically feminine, include being nurturing, warm, and oriented toward caring for others, while agentic traits, stereotypically masculine, include being assertive, independent, and self-promotion focused.
A similar argument holds for question-asking behavior, and its value as a proxy for other variables, such as confidence and belonging. Does it actually tell us something deeper about an individual question asker, or is it just easy to see? Harvard Business School associate professor Alison Wood Brooks considers question asking an important part of conversation because of how often the opportunity to ask a question arises. There are very few evidence-based prescriptions or interventions that can make people more emotionally intelligent, but question asking can.
And women do ask more questions, and speak up more, in different settings. But research into women speaking in public spaces can still help us understand why some women may not pose questions, and what can happen if they do. In a lab experiment, she asked participants to rate the competence and leadership suitability of a hypothetical male and female CEO after they read short biographies describing how much each spoke.
There were four different biographies that differed across two dimensions—gender the CEO was named either Jennifer or John Morgan and talkativeness the CEO was described as either talking more or less than average in the workplace. In the talkative female condition—where the CEO was a female and she spoke more than other people in power—participants rated her as less competent and less suitable for leadership than the male CEO who spoke an equal amount.
One woman told the researchers about a conversation with a male colleague after a meeting in which she had spoken up. Instead of confronting her colleague over his sexist comment, she decided to quiet down in future meetings. In the book A More Beautiful Question , journalist Warren Berger argues that asking better questions can improve decision-making in part by challenging biases and assumptions , spark creative problem-solving, strengthen personal relationships, and enhance leadership.
But those are outcomes. In some settings, for instance, asking more questions could signal lower status if a higher power person is expected to answer questions. When we put women in high-power positions, their inauthentic laughter decreased to the same level of laughter observed in men.
When Natalie Telis was a Ph. Telis wonders if question asking is a kind of bidirectional lever that could help us answer deeper queries. What are the stories we want the research to tell us? And how does that desire, in turn, impact what we measure, and how we interpret those measures?
It certainly seems that people want it to tell us something, or many somethings. Question asking could be a powerful determinant of professional success—and encouraging more of it could be a portal into more opportunities and power for women and other underrepresented groups. Whether or not women ask questions in a particular context could tell us something about them, or it could tell us much more about the environment and people around them.
What we do know for sure: the best way to learn more is to continue asking better questions. Elizabeth Weingarten is the managing editor of Behavioral Scientist. Previously, she worked at the behavioral science design firm ideas42, directed the Global Gender Parity Initiative at the think tank New America and was a senior fellow in its Better Life Lab. Popular on Behavioral Scientist.
0コメント