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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Social psychology v. marketing research"

15 Comments -

1 – 15 of 15
Anonymous hardly said...

I think its possible the experiment with walking speeds was true. I read somewhere that the implicit association test could be gamed by picturing high achieving blacks like mandela in your mind.

5/8/14, 4:15 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe college students like to be manipulated into stupid fads?

Most college students aren't all that smart, and still have the high school metrosexual mentality.

5/8/14, 4:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That walking speed experiment was almost certainly junk to start with. A bunch of results by the guy who did that study (John Bargh) are turning out not to be replicable. Very doubtful it ever worked, in the 1990s or any other time. Google "Many Labs Replication Project" to see the results of a large recent effort to replicate some related social priming effects along with other psych effects in many different labs simultaneously. The other psych effects all worked, but social priming was a complete bust. It's looking like a big urban folktale in a very screwed up social psych field.

5/8/14, 4:52 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

All this noise about Sterling but not much talk about Bryan Singer.

5/8/14, 5:17 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/05/nicholas-wade-interview.html

Nicholas Wade interview: A Troublesome Inheritance

5/8/14, 5:28 PM

Anonymous JeremiahJohnbalaya said...

Great post. Like, borderline profound.

5/8/14, 10:11 PM

Anonymous Drawbacks said...

"The half-life of truths in psychology is 18 months." -- Marvin Minsky

5/9/14, 8:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Todd Gitlin located the origins of this link to marketing much further back than Gladwell, in a piece called "Media Sociology: the Dominant Paradigm"--late 'seventies, I think.

5/9/14, 8:17 AM

Blogger pat said...

I was arguing with my friend Calvin about this. He got incensed when I suggested that empirical verification wasn't the criteria in the social sciences.

That was 1969.

I applied for a Market Research job a few years later at Walter Landor. It was a highly romantic place to work. The company which was famous for designing the Coca-Cola logo was situated on a boat in the San Francisco harbor.

I think I asked for too much money and possibly the fact that I knew nothing about market research. In any case they didn't hire me - and I had worn such a good suit too. Such are life's turning points.

Many years later when I was heading up a software development team and in conflict with my opposite number in the marketing group. I told this story and suddenly got a reputation as a market researcher. I still didn't know anything about market research but it didn't seem to matter. People in the company accepted me as an authority.

I began to think of Market Research as something like Sociology - a lot of airy persiflage that impresses the great unwashed.

Pat Boyle

5/9/14, 9:59 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Social psychology unnerves me. All that rational science in service of learning how to manipulate us like guinea pigs.

5/9/14, 10:45 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Social psychology is, of course, a legitimate scientific endeavor. The problem is that people tend to equate Science with the proclamations and speculation of scientists, which is especially dangerous when the research has anything to do with humans and how they think/act.

If you want to know what Science really has to say, I'm afraid you have to get your hands dirty. Even the abstracts won't cut it. You have to actually read the damn papers and then try to imagine every possible reason why the results might be garbage.

5/9/14, 1:01 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

People can be manipulated even without trying. In a movie Clark Gable took off his shirt and wasn't wearing a t-shirt underneath. T-shirt sales plummeted after that.

5/9/14, 4:23 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Social psychology unnerves me. All that rational science in service of learning how to manipulate us like guinea pigs.

Educational psychology is much the same.

5/9/14, 8:54 PM

Blogger Maxwell Power said...

Steve, ever read any of the later output of George Lakoff? He is a veteran academic eminence who suggested, among other things, that the Howard Dean/netroots faction's main problem was a technique of branding. I've never understood why politicians are complete suckers for this type of consulting; it would seem that, if you need a scientific manual to explain people's tribal behavior, politics probably isn't your bag

5/9/14, 10:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The half-life of truths in psychology is 18 months." -- Marvin Minsky"

With one notable exception: The only 'truth' that seems persistent is the grief stuff ( I believe attributable to Elizabeth Moss-kantor). This phooey has has enjoyed a dream run in last three or four decades; spawning an industry of 'counselling' that makes psychoanalysis at its peak look like a cottage industry.

My intuition is that it goes unchallenged because it offends no-one in particular, and no-one really wants to deal with loss, death and bereavement.

Gilbert P

5/10/14, 5:39 AM

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