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Understanding the psychological rewards of bad habits
Creating new habits to replace old ones
Developing self-discipline
The gold standard: double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized tests
If you are looking at a clinical trial, a psychology study, or an animal study, it must be a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study.
- Randomized: The participants in the study are randomly placed into the experimental group and the comparison group.
- Placebo-controlled: In medical studies, one comparison group gets a placebo, such as a sugar pill. This is to see the effects of the actual drug. (However, placebo effects can be so strong that they often relieve pain, among other health problems.)
- Double-blind: A study is "blind" if the participants don't know whether they are in the experiment or the control group. A study is "double-blind" if the researchers in personal contact with participants also don't know which treatment they are administering.
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Problems with how we view scientific studies
The world is full of evidence and studies, some good and some poor.
- One major problem is that scientific lingo often means something different from everyday language. Words like theory, significant, and control have entirel...
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Be aware of conflicts of interest
One type of conflict of interest is financial. It could be someone who received funding from a company with a vested interest in the study's outcome. Or that person has a relationship with the company that could lead to benefits in the future.
A recent analysis found t...
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The difference between a hypothesis and a theory
A hypothesis is often the first step of the scientific method. It is a proposed and still-unproven explanation that can be tested through experiments and observations.
In science, a theory is a widely accepted idea backed by data, observ...
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Understand "significance"
In science, "statistically significant" is the effect that can be picked up with a particular statistical tool called a p-value. A good p-value (or calculated probability) is arbitrary and can vary between scientific fields. The cut-off for statistically significant is a p-value ...
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Not all journals are created equal
- The Impact Factor is the most commonly used metric to assess a scientific journal's influence. It counts the number of times a journal's papers have been mentioned in other papers, relative to their own output.
- You can find a journal's Impact Factor in the Journal ...
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Correlation is not causation
- Correlation: Scientists may find that two variables are correlated. They may be related, but it doesn't mean that one is causing the other. It could be a coincidence, or perhaps a third variable is causing both of the other two.
- Causation: Lots of ...
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Selection bias
Studies can suffer from selection bias when people are recruited from a specific group that are not representative of the whole. Scientists select a smaller group to study, but the chosen set isn't random enough and is therefore somehow biased in favor of a specific outcome of th...
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Peer review isn't perfect
In a peer review system, independent, anonymous experts read over a paper submitted to a journal. They can recommend revisions to the text, new experiments that should be added, or even that the journal shouldn't publish the paper.
But reviewers aren't asked to ensure that...
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A lot of problems would disappear if we talked to each other more than talking about each other.
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Placebos in research
Placebos are often used in clinical drug trials to determine how well a potential medicine will work.
- There are two different groups of subjects in a placebo-controlled trial - one receives the experimental drug and the other the placebo. Neither researchers nor subjects know which ...
The placebo prescribing controversy
The American Medical Association created a policy concerning placebos that states that "physicians may use placebos for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed of and agrees to its use."
- Generally, doctors who prescribe placebos say that they have something th...
The subject-expectancy effect
When people know what the result of taking a pill is supposed to be, they might unconsciously change their reaction to cause that result or report that result has taken place even if it hasn't.
However, studies show that a placebo doesn't trick the brain - the brain reacts differently to ...
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