If it’s sexy, it’s probably fake.
“Sexy” means “likely to get published in the New York Times and/or get the researcher on a TEDx stage”. Actual sexiness research is not “sexy” because it keeps running into inconvenient results like that rich and high-status men in their forties and skinny women in their early twenties tend to find each other very sexy. The only way to make a result like that “sexy” is to blame it on the patriarchy, and most psychologist aren’t that far gone (yet).
[…]
Anything counterintuitive is also sexy, and (according to Rule 2) less likely to be true. So is anything novel that isn’t based on solid existing research. After all, the Times is the newspaper business, not in the truthspaper one.
Finding robust results is very hard, but getting sexy results published is very easy. Thus, sexy results generally lack robustness. I personally find a certain robustness quite sexy, but that attitude seems to have gone out of fashion since the Renaissance.
Jacob Falkovich, “The Scent of Bad Psychology”, Put a Number On It!, 2018-09-07.
December 13, 2020
QotD: The statistical “Rule of Silicone Boobs”
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