I want students to see examples of how shoddy research gets hyped and trace it back to the underlying work.

[alexh@fediscience.org]

I want students to see examples of how shoddy research gets hyped and trace it back to the underlying work. For an undergraduate seminar, looking for suggestions for take-downs of popular psychology claims, based on critiquing the underlying flawed research. Below are the suitable ones I have so far.
"Compared to what?" is one theme I have; it's my phrase for highlighting that one always needs to think about the control/comparison condition and the possibilty of confounds.

[alexh@fediscience.org]

Nietfeld, E. (2025.). What the most famous book about trauma gets wrong. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk-psychology-therapy-ptsd/ Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score

Learning styles . https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth

Damian, R. I., & Roberts, B. W. (2015). Settling the debate on birth order and personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), 14119–14120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1519064112 What does popular media say about birth order?

Compared to what?
Crede, M. (2019). A Negative Effect of a Contractive Pose is not Evidence for the Positive Effect of an Expansive Pose: Comment on Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse (2018). Meta-Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.15626/MP.2019.1723

Ferguson, C. J. (2025). Do social media experiments prove a link with mental health: A methodological and meta-analytic review. Psychology of Popular Media, 14(2), 201. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-80192-001

Bunce, C., Eggleston, A., Brennan, R., & Over, H. (2025). To what extent is research on infrahumanization confounded by intergroup preference? Royal Society Open Science, 12(4). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/12/4/241348/235666

[odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange]

@alexh weapon effect, power posing, ego depletion, stereotype threat, there's so many of these.

[elduvelle@neuromatch.social]

@alexh
We recently published this
Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta-Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting

It shows that an 80-year-old study, despite being consistently used in lectures and talks to say that rats and humans can do shortcuts over unvisited space, has actually not been replicated and had many flaws. The most solid replication attempts find completely different results from the original experiment while those with somewhat similar results are underpowered or poorly designed.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions about it!

[thomasrhysevans@mas.to]

@alexh A simple but fun example about how breakfast toast-topping could affect mental health. Not shoddy research but how the evidence was distorted (and yes, potentially flawed by some other issues like COI) by the time they became media headlines….

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P9W77YVPGus