The False Promise of Sexiness: Perceived Importance, Interest, and Citation Patterns for Counterintuitive Research Findings

Johnson, Samuel G. B.; Royka, Amanda; McNally, Peter R.; Keil, Frank C.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/45rth

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…In a Bayesian context, surprising findings have greater evidential value, but assessing the surprisingness of evidence (P(E|B)) objectively is difficult given its dependence on the catch-all hypothesis (P(E|~T&B)), and overall surprisingness does not matter when two hypotheses are compared (Salmon 1990). Finally, historically, surprisingness and scientific importance differ (Stigler 1955;Johnson et al 2019).…”

Section: Resolving the Invariance Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Variation Matters to Philosophy

Machery¹

2023

Res Phil.

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Experimental philosophers often seem to ignore or downplay the significance of demographic variation in philosophically relevant judgments. This article confirms this impression, discusses why demographic research is overlooked in experimental philosophy, and argues that variation is philosophically significant.Following the groundbreaking research by Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich (2001), part of experimental philosophy has endeavored to assess how much philosophical judgments vary across cultures, languages, religions, generations, age groups, genders, or socioeconomic groups (a research tradition that I will call "comparative experimental philosophy"). 1 Recent large-scale projects such as the Geography of Philosophy Project have extended comparative experimental philosophy in a more systematic direction (Kiper et al. 2022). This project, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, has been examining since 2017 how people understand three concepts of philosophical interest, viz. the concepts of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, across cultures, religions, and languages using a variety of empirical methods: qualitative interviews, computational text analyses of large linguistic corpora in many languages, experimental studies using verbal and visual stimuli, and experimental paradigms drawn from experimental economics. 2 The results of the Geography of Philosophy Project and, more broadly, of the research tradition started by Weinberg et al. (2001) are naturally relevant for psychology and anthropology, 3 but their philosophical relevance might not seem obvious: why does it matter for philosophy if judgments of philosophical interest such as those about beauty, fairness, and love vary? The goal of this article is to offer a response to this question.Here is how I will proceed. In Section 1, I examine why the study of variation has been relatively neglected: I examine various plausible causes, and I also assess whether they justify this neglect. In Section 2, I review the 1 This goal is sometimes put in terms of concepts instead of, or in addition to, judgments, the goal being then to assess how much concepts vary. 2 More information can be found on the project's webpage: www.geographyofphilosophy.com and on its YouTube's channel: www.youtube.com/@geographyofphilosophyproje9275. 3 That said, anthropologists might have some concerns with the meaningfulness of asking philosophical questions to lay people across cultures (see, e.g., Clark Barrett in the following video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxMFDZ__MXY).

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Section: Resolving the Invariance Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Variation Matters to Philosophy

Machery¹

2023

Res Phil.

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“…Scholars in other business disciplines including management (Barley, 2006; Das & Long, 2010), entrepreneurship (Landström & Harirchi, 2019), and family business research (Salvato & Aldrich, 2012) have also opined on the issue. While counterintuitive results are judged as more important and more interesting by academics and laypeople alike (Johnson et al, 2020) as well as by journal editors (cf. Goyanes, 2020), it is only one of many ways by which one might produce interesting research.…”

Section: That's Interesting!mentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing the sins of consumer psychology via the evolutionary lens

Saad

2021

Psychology and Marketing

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As is true of any scientific discipline, consumer psychology faces some challenges, many of which can be ameliorated via the use of evolutionary psychology. This includes broadening the scope of the research questions tackled as well as their interestingness; increasing the epistemological and theoretical scope of the discipline; reducing the likelihood of succumbing to the WEIRD sampling bias; decreasing methodological fixation; increasing interdisciplinarity; and augmenting the ethos of replications as well as the field's consilience via the building of consilient nomological networks of cumulative evidence. Modern-day consumers exhibit preferences and behaviors that are vestiges of evolutionary forces that occurred long ago in deep evolutionary time. Marketing academics and practitioners alike, seeking to unlock the mysteries of what makes consumers tick, can only be enriched in recognizing that Homo consumericus is a product of the same evolutionary processes that have shaped all life forms. To deny this reality ensures that marketing knowledge will remain largely decoupled from biology, and in doing so engender at best an incomplete understanding of consumer behavior.

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