andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1128 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. [sent-1, score-0.263]
2 Here’s the background: Men are more jealous than women about sexual infidelity, and women are more jealous than men about emotional infidelity. [sent-7, score-1.142]
3 The idea is that men fear cuckoldry–they don’t want to get stuck raising other men’s genetic offspring—so it’s a big deal if their woman sleeps around. [sent-9, score-0.236]
4 The new paper [by Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly] reports a factor that explains some of the sex differences in jealousy: attachment style. [sent-14, score-0.535]
5 People who are dismissive of relationships are more threatened by sexual infidelity than other people are (sex matters more to them than intimacy), and on average men are more dismissive of relationships than women. [sent-15, score-1.554]
6 Because early childhood experiences often influence attachment style, Begley writes: “Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes. [sent-16, score-1.311]
7 ’” Begley continues: An intriguing new study suggests that the gender gap in jealousy may be the result of something that is not at all hard-wired: the different ways boys and girls are raised. [sent-19, score-0.471]
8 people whose parents were warm and loving and reliable sources of emotional support tend to be “securely” attached, forming successful adult relationships that are not marred by excessive clinginess or jealousy. [sent-27, score-0.578]
9 But people whose parents were distant or cold tend to be “avoidant”: they are either dismissive of close relationships (and therefore prefer autonomy to commitment, and are often promiscuous) or afraid of them. [sent-28, score-0.455]
10 [Levy and Kelly] hypothesized that people who are dismissive of relationships would be more distressed by sexual than emotional infidelity. [sent-32, score-0.994]
11 That held for men as well as women—no sex difference. [sent-37, score-0.341]
12 They also found that men and women who are fearful of relationships are more upset by emotional infidelity; again, no sex difference. [sent-38, score-0.946]
13 Only men and women who are dismissive of relationships, the scientists found, are more upset by sexual straying than by a mate’s finding his or her soul mate in someone else. [sent-39, score-0.889]
14 Because “more men than women are dismissive of relationships, and because such people are concerned more about sexual infidelity,” they write, “what looks like a gender difference is in fact an attachment effect”—that is, a product of how people feel about forming close relationships. [sent-40, score-1.216]
15 Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes. [sent-41, score-1.003]
16 That captures the general impression of what Levy and Kelly wrote: We hypothesized that attachment‐style differences may help to explain both between‐ and within‐sex differences in jealousy. [sent-42, score-0.32]
17 As hypothesized, dismissing avoidant participants reported more jealousy regarding sexual than emotional infidelity . [sent-43, score-1.231]
18 and secure participants, including secure men, reported more jealousy regarding emotional than sexual infidelity . [sent-46, score-1.226]
19 Although between‐sex differences in jealousy clearly exist, the within‐sex differences suggest the existence of additional processes beyond those proposed by the parental‐investment model. [sent-49, score-0.559]
20 Sometimes you think rappers might be rapping about something other than rapping . [sent-65, score-0.363]
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
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Introduction: Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. . . . We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES [effect size], the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men a
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Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
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Introduction: I’ll reorder this week’s posts a bit in order to continue on a topic that came up yesterday. A couple days ago a reporter wrote to me asking what I thought of this paper on Money, Status, and the Ovulatory Cycle. I responded: Given the quality of the earlier paper by these researchers, I’m not inclined to believe anything these people write. But, to be specific, I can point out some things: - The authors define low fertility as days 8-14. Oddly enough, these authors in their earlier paper used days 7-14. But according to womenshealth.gov, the most fertile days are between days 10 and 17. The choice of these days affects their analysis, and it is not a good sign that they use different days in different papers. (see more on this point in sections 2.3 and 3.1 of this paper: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf) - They perform a lot of different analyses, and many others could be performed. For example, “Study 1 indicates that ovul
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