Truth is: I’ve become increasingly agitated by most science reporting of psychological studies.  Somewhere along the way, something usually gets misrepresented.  Maybe it’s the sensational title.  Maybe it’s the misquoting.  Maybe it’s a misunderstanding of what a correlation means or what constitutes a large or meaningful effect size or the equating of a gene with a phenomenon (“the loser gene”), or a billion other things that drive me nuts. 

Then, there’s the fact that most people can’t access the original journal article written by the researcher themselves, so they are at the mercy of the journalists to get the facts right and interpret the facts correctly.  The fact that many of these studies are hidden from the general public helps science reporters, since they can ‘break a story’ before anyone else can.  However, it is my view that good science should be shared.  People are more intelligent than the media gives them credit.  While they may not be able to understand every last statistic, usually the Discussion section of articles is fairly comprehensible to a general audience.  At the very least, all the hard work of the scientist in spending days, months, and years working on that article should see the light of day, not be hidden among 10 other scientific peers. 

So, to help remedy this current state of affairs, I’m starting a series here on my personal blog called “STUDY ALERT” where I will occasionally present studies that I personally think are high quality and interesting, along with the abstract and a link to download the full paper.  I’m still going to continue writing up summaries of studies, but there is so much fascinating research that comes out that I don’t have the time to write them all up. 

We’ll see how this goes! 

First up:

Fluid insight moderates the relationship between psychoticism and crystallized intelligence

by

Robert Buckingham, Michael Kiernan, Samantha Ainsworth

Abstract