📚 This is an archive of Aid Thoughts, a development economics blog that was active from 2009 to 2017. Posts and comments are preserved in their original form.

The bane of negative results

From Ben Goldacre, on a replication of the precognitive study which caught the headlines last year:

Now the study has been replicated. Three academics – Stuart Richie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman – have re-run three of these backwards experiments, just as Bem ran them, and found no evidence of precognition. They submitted their negative results to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which published Bem’s paper last year, and the journal rejected their paper out of hand. We never, they explained, publish studies that replicate other work.
Hat tip to Christ Blattman - see a related, geeky but chuckle-worthy joke here.

Categories: Research