We’re pleased to present an excerpt from chapter 10, “The Replication Crisis,” of Augustine Brannigan’s The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology (Routledge 2021), with permission from the publisher. Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and … Continue reading Social psychology in the age of retraction

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has retracted a 2018 paper because, according to a retraction notice, the first author changed data in a way that “resulted in incorrect and misleading results.” The article, “Cardiovascular and self-regulatory consequences of SES-based social identity threat,” claims to show that socioeconomic status-based “social identity threat can go from ‘in … Continue reading Columbia grad student faked data in study of socioeconomics and life experiences, says retraction notice

A psychology journal has retracted a pair of decades-old articles by a now-deceased psychologist with noxious views about race and intelligence after the editors concluded that his work was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.” The author, J. Philippe Rushton, was affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, where he was … Continue reading Psychology journal retracts two articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

We wrote in September in WIRED about a trend among journals of purging racist and sexist work from their archives. To that trend we can now add papers that a homophobic and racist. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease has retracted a 1951 article by one Benjamin H. Glover, at the time a professor … Continue reading Journal retracts 70-year-old article on homosexuality for “long discredited beliefs, prejudices, and practices”

A psychiatry journal has expressed concern about a 46-year-old paper which described attempts to correct “deviant” gender identity in a 5-year-old boy using physical violence — the latest example of journals purging (or semi-purging) their pages of offensive studies.  The 1974 article, “Behavioral treatment of deviant sex‐role behaviors in a male child,” appeared in the … Continue reading Journal flags — but does not retract — decades-old paper on “correcting” gender identity

A controversial psychologist has lost a bizarre paper which claimed that men who carry guitar cases do better with the ladies. The article, which had appeared in the journal The Psychology of Music in 2014, was one of many papers by Nicholas Guéguen that have raised eyebrows among his peers and some data sleuths — … Continue reading Heard about the study claiming men who carry guitar cases are more attractive? It’s been retracted.

Journals hoping that Clarivate Analytics — the company behind the Impact Factor — would reverse their decision to suppress their titles from the closely watched metric are batting .500. In July, as we reported, Clarivate suppressed 33 journals from its Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which means they will not have a 2019 Impact Factor, because … Continue reading Major indexing service rejects appeals by two suppressed journals