.png)
Modern research always comes with a set of assumptions. A context that is most relevant to society makes studies far more interesting. It’s been setting the trend by the academicians and researchers started to deal with people more often than studies continue to pile up, with ideas moving around and replicated to bring about. The recent times for behavioural science have not been good. A widespread loss of trust in the realm of the school of thought, since it was spreading some amount of data issues. Reliability of the data has become one of the important talking points, which had taken the center stage. This has also resulted in issues of misinterpretation and a high rate of mistrust that is said has questioned the credibility of the subject.
Cause of the controversy
In the recent reports, a research study was carried out by Dan Ariely and his team, on the working of the insurance company. The study was to check on the aspect of authenticity and truthfulness in their report. It was mainly concerning the working of the IRS (internal revenue services). The studies were carried out a couple of years ago and the methodology applied to prove was not verified. Further, when future researchers tried to replicate the same, the results were the opposite of what was initially proven. The results were said to be more of a farce, a fake.
Back in the days of the pandemic, Arely and his co-authors tried to do the same research and failed to be proven, the initial claimed results. The question did come to the forefront if the data collected for the previous studies were fake. Finally, the authors themselves concluded that their results were all a fluke and published a paper stating the reasons for the same.
Problems with recently published studies
The studies when taking the inspiration from the inspiration from main paper results would always come out negating the previous claims. The entire purpose of researching the mentioned area would be more of a wasteful exercise. More than all this sense, behavioural science is one of the trending branches of economics and psychology combined, publishing false results using the so-called ‘scientific methodology’ seriously unacceptable.
In many of the behavioural studies or any of the economics research papers, the aspect of the ‘p values’ usually determines the validity of the results collected. The results should pass the minimum significance level (p<0.05) to prove the findings. Unfortunately, in the real academic world, several research papers are published to determine the value of the organization. Hence there ‘re chances to manipulate the results to make them significant. This is said to be the general behaviour of the psychologists to make the studies, stand out. The fact that not paying attention to the ‘p values’ is one of the reasons such studies continue to surface on various platforms. This instance should be taken care of by all researchers, students and research scholars so that their studies do not jeopardize, their original studies from being published.
Perfect device to check the authenticity of behavioral studies
To save the behavioural studies, from controversies, a group of behavioural scientists devised a new test to question their studies in terms of the data collected. The test determines the evidence if it supports the claim completely, or just manages to clutter below the statistical significance level. This methodology was founded by Joe Simmons, Lief Nelson and Uri Simon John. The trio of economists together known as ‘data detectives. Through this, the aspects of the faults in studies of Dan Ariely on the IRS services are mentioned earlier in the article.
However, this victory is more significant to prove the point that there could be studies that could be fake and insignificant in the body of literature concerning behavioural studies. This can be a step in the right direction to proactively remove false results-based studies. Hope this move could strengthen the studies that would be published forward.
By-
M. Kumar
Comments