The Popularity of Silly Methods
17th March 2014
In Bryan’s blog post Predicting the Popularity of Obvious Methods, he suggests that social scientists are more likely to pursue non-obvious methods when the obvious methods don’t provide the answer that they like. In the spirit of his post, the use of non-obvious or overly sophisticated methods can signal that the researcher kept trying until they got the “right” answer. The skeptical might view this as a warning sign about the research.
Most people do not consume research firsthand. Instead, it is filtered through the media. Journalists also have preferences over answers. If a newspaper doesn’t like the answer that research provides, they have wide latitude to ignore it. This means that one can infer the preferences of the media by the research that they do cite. Instead of sophisticated methods being the “tell,” journalists show their preferences by citing weak research.
Let that be a warning to us all.