"Research shows"

I listen to academic lectures while driving in my car.  The Great Courses are fairly aggressively marketed by The Teaching Company and some of their excellent material is available only in video form.  From my experience, I believe that the audio track is far more important than the visual and I shy away from buying strictly visual material, unless that is the only format available.  

I do get surprised at how much I learn from a collection of short drives to the grocery store.

Right now, I am listening to Prof. Steven Novella of the Yale School of Medicine discussing tricks our minds play on us.  You may well be familiar with all of them.  Such things as personal experience biasing your estimate of things (Grandma was diabetic and so was Dad, so I have to expect to).  He emphasizes that human brains find patterns all the time, whether they are really there or not.  He also emphasizes how stories penetrate our imaginations and stay in our memories much better than facts or figures.

In trying to dispel ideas, such as the existence of the hot hand in basketball, where a player has a hot streak going and should be given the ball, Novella refers to research that does not support the idea of the existence of special, non-random genuine streaks of especially good shooting for the basket.  He says "Research shows" or "Research repeatedly shows" but I believe such statements need to be taken with a grain of salt.  

My experience has been that research on people is not as world-shaking as some psychologists and researchers want to think.  It is natural, if your dissertation or promotion or tenure depends on a big-deal finding, to feel that you have uncovered a new law of gravity or something equally fundamental.  However, I often wish I could tip off some subjects.  Take the famous Asch experiments on conformity.  We have three confederates state that shorter lines are actually longer and see if we can induce conformity in the unaware subject.  This has possibly been done to death but there are many conditions and special circumstances that need to be investigated.  

I was part of an academic department for more than 30 years and we probably had less that standard conformity in our discussions.  Heck, right in my marriage, I find plenty of differences of opinion each day.  

I would like to have a science of human minds and I know many, many top-notch thinkers, observers and investigators have worked, are working and will work on understanding how we think.  But I hope we are keep our salt shakers handy and don't automatically decide that anyone someone with a degree says 'research shows' is fully and unconditionally true.  What research?  When?  Where?  What sort of subjects?  What sort were left out of the study?  Has the study been repeated?  How many times?

This subject relates to the problem of information transfer or being buried in paper.  The wise old man, whom we believe has read and understood all those studies, says they boil down to X.  Do they?  Would you boil them down to X?  Would I?

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety