Almost nothing was happening for a long time, and even after the first revelations and theoretical articles you could still ignore the crisis if you were focused on your research and other responsibilities. Remember, as late as 2011, even Daniel Kahneman was saying of priming studies that “disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”Then, all of a sudden, the world turned upside down.
But the claim is true because the real “conclusion of the paper” doesn’t depend on any of its details—all that matters is that there’s something, somewhere, that has p less than .05, because that’s enough to make publishable, promotable claims about “the pervasiveness and persistence of the elderly stereotype” or whatever else they want to publish that day.When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter, it makes you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all.