Stuart Ritchie
Psychologist, formerly a lecturer at King's College London, author of Science Fictions, a book about fraud, bias, negligence and hype in research, and of the Science Fictions newsletter, where he takes individual papers and press releases apart in public.
Stuart Ritchie did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsThis, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t.
↗Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org 1st of 5 in this piece
-
Their wordsWe know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
↗Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org 2nd of 5 in this piece
-
Their wordsHaving a pre-existing conclusion—a “take-home message”—in mind is one of the most reality-distorting influences on our thinking.
↗Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org 3rd of 5 in this piece
-
Their wordsA scientific paper isn’t supposed to be a story.
↗Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org 4th of 5 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words—limited by a journal-imposed word count—is itself a distortion of reality.
↗Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org 5th of 5 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
-
Our reading
A tiny, unreplicated study should not be publicised to millions of people as though it were settled.
Their wordsMore generally, you’ve got to wonder if Dweck considered whether the results of this very small, to my knowledge unreplicated, study were really ripe for publicising to literally millions of people
↗How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org 1st of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsThe decline effect is the idea that scientific findings get smaller over time. That is, initial findings tend to report effect sizes that then crumble away—sometimes to nothing—with subsequent research.
↗How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org 2nd of 3 in this piece
-
Their wordsInitial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.
↗How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
-
Their wordsAnd that’s because, whereas this scientist is right that conflicts of interest of some kind are probably inevitable, conflicts are a bad thing.
↗Science is political - and that's a bad thingsciencefictions.org 1st of 2 in this piece
-
Their wordsI’ve noticed that, instead of treating them like other kinds of conflicts—where you put your hands up and admit to them but then do your best to make sure they don’t influence your science—scientists sometimes revel in political conflicts.
↗Science is political - and that's a bad thingsciencefictions.org 2nd of 2 in this piece