Satire of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's publication bias

The evidence for precognition is JPSP itself. Just open a random issue. In it, you’ll find countless a priori hypotheses anticipating the findings that eventually occurred. It is patently obvious that one could not possibly have anticipated the results without some form of precognition. Examples:

• People walk slower after thinking about moving to Florida?
• People are obsessed with thinking about white bears?
• People have, don’t have, have, don’t have, have personalities?

Skeptics may think that this evidence is just cherry-picking. Not so. Consider the sheer magnitude of hypothesis confirmation. The Figure presents the proportion of hypotheses by the authors of JPSP articles that were confirmed versus disconfirmed. All hypotheses except for two were confirmed. In one case, Denes-Raj and Epstein (1994) had a secondary hypothesis that their primary hypothesis would be incorrect. In the other case, Zajonc (1969), himself an alien with domination aspirations (Bones, 1996), declared that by 1974 cockroaches would control most of the eastern U.S. because “it would be so easy and they inspire each other so damn well.” Compared to the paltry accuracy rates by Bem’s precognition subjects (less than 60%!), the conclusion is clear: Bem’s effects are startlingly weak compared to the published evidence for precognition in JPSP.

Brilliant.

This was actually published, in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Some other "publications" by "Arina Bones" [actually Brian Nosek]:

Bones, A. K. & Gosling, S. D. (2009). Do Social Psychologists cause priming research or does priming research cause Social Psychologists? Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Tampa, FL. [Note: The 2nd author's contribution was extracted from his memory under sedation. Any protests that he did not contribute should be ignored.]

Bones, A. K. & Johnson, N. R. (2007). Measuring the immeasurable, or, "Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?" Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 406-411.

Bones, A. K., & Johnson, N.R. (2002). Phil Zimbardo is definitely an alien. American Psychologist, 57, 1135–1142.

Bones, A. K. (1996). Invaders need no facilitators: Merely exposing the alien "Zajonc". American Psychologist, 51, 1231–1238.

(Some of these are fake; some seem to have been actually published.)

The essential argument here is clever- their extremely high rate of turning up hypotheses that are confirmed suggest that they must have psychic abilities.

There's a legitimate criticism here. But it may not be as legitimate as it seems at first glance. The most obvious problem here is publication bias (very bad), but there are other explanations as well, such as a tendency to write papers after the fact like the result was the initial hypothesis (bad but not nearly as bad as publication bias in terms of the long-term damage). Also, in areas like psychology, there's another possibility- humans have some developed intuitions for psychological behavior. In that regard, we may do a better job intuiting the correct results in psychology than in other fields, and thus hypotheses are more likely to be correct in psychology. The result here is too extreme for this last bit to account for everything at hand, and certainly there are areas where human intuition about psychology is woefully bad, but this may account for a substantial fraction of what is going on here.

In any event, there really are serious problems in psychology as a subject as a whole, and the JPSP is not an isolated case.

This is amazing.