31. Stuart Ritchie: Science Fictions, fraud, and open science

Aug 20, 2021

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Stuart Ritchie is Lecturer at King's College London, where he studies behavioural genetics in relation to personality and cognitive ability. In this conversation, we don't talk about any of that though but instead focus on his book Science Fictions, a book about how science goes wrong, and the topics covered therein.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:41: Trying to replicate Bem (2011) Feeling the future
0:09:58: Wy write Science Fictions?
0:17:24: How to (get people to) adopt open science practices?
0:36:31: Stuart will pay you if you find errors in Science Fictions
0:46:44: Should scientific journals have an automatic way for reporting errors?
0:56:52: Gorecki, Boulez, and cultural references
1:01:45: Scientific fraud: Stapel, Macchiarini, and Hwang
1:31:05: Will many small steps improve science sufficiently or do we need a revolution?

Podcast links

Website: https://bjks.buzzsprout.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjksPodcast

Guest's links

Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/stuart-ritchie
Book website: https://www.sciencefictions.org/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=9TsCy3IAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stuartjritchie

Ben's links

Website: www.bjks.blog/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-nWNfvcAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bjks_tweets

References and further links
Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Leung, A. K. Y., Kim, S., Polman, E., Ong, L. S., Qiu, L., Goncalo, J. A., & Sanchez-Burks, J. (2012). Embodied metaphors and creative “acts”. Psychological Science.
Nosek, B. A., Beck, E. D., Campbell, L., Flake, J. K., Hardwicke, T. E., Mellor, D. T., ... & Vazire, S. (2019). Preregistration is hard, and worthwhile. Trends in cognitive sciences.
Quintana, D. S. (2020). A synthetic dataset primer for the biobehavioural sciences to promote reproducibility and hypothesis generation. Elife.
Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). Failing the future: Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect. PloS One.
Ritchie, S. (2020). Science fictions: How fraud, bias, negligence, and hype undermine the search for truth. Metropolitan Books.

The Halloween challenge at Goldsmiths I helped out with: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/31/halloween-challenge-psychics-scientific-trial
Stuart will pay you if you find errors in Science Fictions: https://www.sciencefictions.org/corrections
Pierre Boulez's notation for piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD2SwVZBI80