{"id":16459,"date":"2012-08-14T09:15:19","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T14:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16459"},"modified":"2012-08-14T09:15:48","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T14:15:48","slug":"anecdotes-are-not-data-demise-of-guys-based-on-anecdotal-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/14\/anecdotes-are-not-data-demise-of-guys-based-on-anecdotal-evidence\/","title":{"rendered":"Anecdotes are not data: <em>Demise of Guys<\/em> based on anecdotal evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2012\/08\/14\/the-demise-of-social-science\" target=\"_blank\">Jacob Sullum<\/a> on the recent ebook <em>The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It<\/em>, by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Zimbardo\u2019s thesis is that \u201cboys are struggling\u201d in school and in love because they play video games too much and watch too much porn. But he and his co-author, a recent University of Colorado graduate named Nikita Duncan, never establish that boys are struggling any more nowadays than they were when porn was harder to find and video games were limited to variations on <em>Pong<\/em>. The data they cite mostly show that girls are doing better than boys, not that boys are doing worse than they did before <em>xvideos.com<\/em> and <em>Grand Theft Auto<\/em>. Such an association would by no means be conclusive, but it\u2019s the least you\u2019d expect from a respected social scientist like Zimbardo, who oversaw the famous Stanford \u201cprison experiment\u201d that we all read about in Psych 101.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>One source of evidence that Zimbardo and Duncan rely on heavily, an eight-question survey of people who watched Zimbardo\u2019s TED talk online, is so dubious that anyone with a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology (such as Duncan), let alone a Ph.D. (such as Zimbardo), should be embarrassed to cite it without a litany of caveats. The most important one: It seems probable that people who are attracted to Zimbardo\u2019s talk, watch it all the way through, and then take the time to fill out his online survey are especially likely to agree with his thesis and especially likely to report problems related to electronic diversions. This is not just a nonrepresentative sample; it\u2019s a sample bound to confirm what Zimbardo thinks he already knows. \u201cWe wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested in the topic,\u201d the authors claim. Mostly validated, to judge by their survey design.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Other sources of evidence cited by Zimbardo and Duncan are so weak that they have the paradoxical effect of undermining their argument rather than reinforcing it. How do Zimbardo and Duncan know about \u201cthe sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships\u201d? Because \u201ca highly educated female colleague alerted us\u201d to this \u201cnew phenomenon.\u201d How do they know that \u201cone consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography&#8230;is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects\u201d? Because of a theory propounded by <em>Daily Mail<\/em> columnist Penny Marshall. How do they know that \u201cmen are as good as their women require them to be\u201d? Because that\u2019s what \u201cone 27-year-old guy we interviewed\u201d said.<\/p>\n<p>Even when more rigorous research is available, Zimbardo and Duncan do not necessarily bother to look it up. How do they know that teenagers \u201cwho spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming obese\u201d? Because an NPR correspondent said so. Likewise, the authors get their information about the drawbacks of the No Child Left Behind Act from a gloss of a RAND Corporation study in a <em>San Francisco Chronicle<\/em> editorial. This is the level of documentation you\u2019d expect from a mediocre high school student, not a college graduate, let alone a tenured social scientist at a leading university.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jacob Sullum on the recent ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. Zimbardo\u2019s thesis is that \u201cboys are struggling\u201d in school and in love because they play video games too much and watch too much porn. But he and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,73],"tags":[86,408,513,42,290],"class_list":["post-16459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-randomness","tag-criticism","tag-pornography","tag-research","tag-sociology","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4ht","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16459"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16461,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459\/revisions\/16461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}