alt Hacker News> We carried out an online survey, administered via Survey Monkey
This type of thing, where they do some statistics on survey data, seems to be fairly typical in psychology research. But I find it hard to believe that you can actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys.
There must be selection effects: "The survey was advertised on social media and through the researchers’ own networks".
And the questions may not be interpreted by the respondents as imagined. What does it mean if you select "None of the above" in their core question? That you think that objects have no attributes whatsoever? "Do you ever view objects as having: Gender / Human-like attributes / Feelings / Other / None of the above"
See also "replication crisis". Psychology is at the center of it.
Replies
Yup. There's so much pressure to publish something that we consistently see attempts to extract data from noise.
> I find it hard to believe that you can get actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys.
Especially when you consider the Lizardman's Constant of 4%
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
This article was written in 2013. The Internet has become a significantly more toxic place since then, and I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
Forget the quality of the data, you can give the same data to different researchers and get wildly different conclusions. [1, from 2, from 3]
(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)
[1] N. Breznau et al., “Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty,” PNAS, October 2022, URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119
[2] B. Klaas, “The Crisis of Zombie Social Science.” The Garden of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-zombie-social-sc...
[3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057