Education, Psychology, Top Stories
Published on July 30, 2019
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# The Other Crisis in Psychology

written by April L. Bleske-Rechek

In July 2019, Christopher Ferguson published an article in Quillette on the replication crisis in psychology. As an academic psychologist, I appreciated his clear and concise discussion of some of the difficult issues facing psychology’s growth as a science, including publication bias and the sensationalizing of weak effects. I believe a related, but perhaps less-recognized, illness plagues psychology and related disciplines (including the health sciences, family studies, sociology, and education). That illness is the conflation of correlation with causation, and the latest research suggests that scientists, and not lay people and the media, are the underlying culprits.

Correlation and Causation

We have probably all heard the cliché “Correlation is not causation.” Of the criteria for documenting that one variable causes a change in another variable, correlation is just the first of three.

That is, the first criterion for documenting that one variable causes a change in another variable is evidence that the two variables covary together: as one goes up, the other tends to, too (a positive correlation; for example, students who score high on the SAT tend to also have a higher GPA in college),1 or as one variable goes up, the other tends to go down (a negative correlation; for example, people who have a stronger interest in working with people vs. things are less likely to major in inorganic disciplines such as computer science and physics).

The second criterion is that of temporal precedence: the presumed cause must come before the presumed effect. For example, people who are spanked during childhood tend to score lower on IQ tests during adolescence.2 Descriptions of temporal precedence tend to evoke cause and effect interpretations. For example, in the context of spanking and IQ, it is tempting to infer that spanking causes lower IQ. However, temporal precedence is necessary but not sufficient for inferring causality. As Steven Pinker described in The Blank Slate, if you set two alarms when you go to bed, one for 6:00am and the other for 6:15am, and the first alarm reliably goes off before the second alarm, you will have evidence of systematic covariance and temporal precedence, but that doesn’t mean that the first alarm caused the second alarm to go off. Likewise, spanking in childhood occurs before the measurement of IQ in adolescence, but that doesn’t provide evidence that spanking causes lower IQ. The tendency to infer causality from temporal precedence appears to underly belief in the well-refuted myth that vaccines cause autism3: Because vaccines are given before symptoms of autism reveal themselves, people are quick to mistakenly assume that the vaccines cause autism. By this logic, everything from crawling to walking is a cause of autism.

The third criterion is of utmost importance. To infer causality, researchers must address potential confounding variables—variables other than the presumed cause that could account for the association between the presumed cause and effect. In the case of spanking and IQ, for example, one can entertain all kinds of potential (and non-mutually exclusive) confounds: living in a high-stress, poverty-stricken environment could lead to both being spanked and suboptimal development of cognitive ability; lower parental IQ could be accounting for both the use of corporal punishment and children’s lower IQ scores; pre-existing low IQ scores in children could lead to both being spanked and continued lower IQ scores into adolescence; etc. To make the case for a specific cause (such as spanking), the cause must be isolated and then, via random assignment, imposed upon some individuals and not others (or varying levels of the cause must be imposed on different groups of individuals). Generally, this is accomplished through experimental design that includes manipulation of the presumed cause followed by measurement of the variable that is predicted to be affected by the manipulation.

No ethical researcher plans on randomly assigning parents to engage in varying degrees of corporal punishment to assess its isolated effects on children’s IQ. But other questions about humans can be tackled with experiments. For example, researchers who want to test the hypothesis that playing violent games increases aggression have used experimental designs4 in which some individuals are randomly assigned to play a violent video game for a specified period of time and others are assigned to play a similarly arousing but non-violent video game; after imposing the manipulation, individuals’ aggression is measured.

A controlled experiment—in which a specific causal variable is manipulated by the researcher, participants are randomly assigned to experience different levels of that manipulated variable, everything else is held constant, and the effects of that manipulation are then measured objectively—is the “gold standard” for documenting causality. Notably, documenting that a variable has a causal impact on another variable does not mean that it determines that other variable. In the case of violent video games and aggression, there may be evidence that exposure to violent video games has short-term influence on aggressive thoughts,5 but exposure to violent video games doesn’t determine how aggressive people are; it is just one of many variables that influence aggression.

Perhaps the distinction between correlation and causation makes perfect sense to you. Lucky you, because you are not in the majority. The tendency to conflate correlation and causation is well-known and discussed widely in books on logical thinking (such as Keith Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought) and biases in thinking (such as Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things).

Several years ago, my students and I published systematic evidence that the tendency to conflate correlation with causation occurs regardless of how educated people are. In one study, for example, we gave a group of community adults a hypothetical research vignette that described a correlational study of students’ self-esteem and academic performance, in which both variables were measured (observed) and neither was manipulated. To another group of participants, we gave a hypothetical research vignette that described an experimental study in which students’ self-esteem was manipulated (that is, by random assignment some students received self-esteem promoting messages and some students did not) and then the students’ academic performance was measured. For both groups of participants, the research vignette concluded with a statement that the study revealed a positive correlation between self-esteem and academic performance. Then, we asked the participants what inferences they could draw from the finding.

The participants in the two groups were equally likely to conclude that self-esteem leads to academic success, even though participants who read about the correlational study should not have drawn that conclusion. Moreover, participants who read about the correlational study were similarly likely to draw an erroneous causal inference regardless of how educated they were! (The inference that self-esteem enhances academic performance, by the way, actually goes against the latest science, which shows quite clearly that if self-esteem and academic success are causally connected, it is academic success that precedes self-esteem, not the reverse!)6

The Language of Causality

As a likely manifestation of the human bias toward inferring cause and effect, there are far more ways to describe cause and effect associations than there are ways to describe non-causal associations. When my colleagues and I pored through several hundred journal articles in psychology, we found more than 100 different words and phrases that were used to denote cause-and-effect relationships. These are shown in the word cloud below, with the most commonly used words in large font.

There are probably hundreds of ways of denoting cause and effect relationships, and the reason this is important is that people don’t really know what does and does not qualify as causal language,7 nor (as I described above) do they recognize the conditions under which causal language is warranted. So, if a description of research findings uses causal language without justification, the reader is unlikely to realize it, and hence they will be misled without having a clue they are being misled.

Scholars have repeatedly blamed the media for inappropriate use of causal language. In 2016, when Brian Resnick of Vox asked famous psychologists and social scientists what journalists get wrong when writing about research, conflating correlation and causation topped the list. Indeed, unwarranted causal inferences abound in the media. A quick search on nearly any news site will reveal headlines like “How Student Alcohol Consumption Affects GPA” and “Sincere Smiling Promotes Longevity” and “For Teens, Online Bullying Worsens Sleep and Depression,” all of which are causal claims made on the basis of non-causal (correlational) research with measured variables.

Recently, though, several studies have shown that unwarranted causal language begins with scientists themselves. For example, in medicine, one extensive review showed that over half of articles about correlational studies included cause and effect interpretations of the findings.8 And in education, a review of articles published in teaching and learning journals found that over a third of articles about correlational studies included causal statements.9 In psychology, my colleagues and I conducted two studies that reinforced the ubiquity of the problem. First, we reviewed a random sample of poster abstracts that had been accepted for presentation at an annual convention of the premier professional organization in psychology, the Association for Psychological Science. We were disappointed to find that over half of the abstracts that included cause and effect language did so without warrant (i.e., the research was correlational). Of course, poster presentations are held to a less rigorous standard than are formal talks or published journal articles, so in a follow-up study, we reviewed 660 articles from 11 different well-known journals in the discipline. Our findings replicated: over half of the articles with cause and effect language described studies that were actually correlational; in other words, the causal language was not warranted.

When I submitted our analysis of unwarranted causal language to a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, the journal editor dismissed the submission, saying the human tendency to conflate correlation with causation is already well-known. Well, it may be a well-known bias, but it is obviously not easy to address if it is rampant in the poster presentations of one of psychology’s most popular professional conventions and just as prevalent in highly respected journals in the discipline. (We did proceed to publish our findings in a different journal whose editor asked us to submit to them.)

Failing to Consider Confounds

The failure to consider confounds and to erroneously infer causality from correlational data inhibits us from developing optimally effective solutions to the problems we face in society. Consider, for example, the massive variation among young children in their early language acquisition and subsequent school achievement. One of the most commonly referenced studies in early childhood development and education is Hart & Risley’s 1995 longitudinal study that demonstrated that children raised in low socioeconomic status homes had parents who spoke far fewer words to them than did children raised in high socioeconomic status homes, and these early differences in language experience predicted subsequent disparities between children in their vocabularies and school achievement.10 This link was interpreted as causal—that the verbal environment parents provide to their children is a key influence on their children’s verbal development—and it spurred many intensive and expensive programs that teach and support verbal interaction between parents and infants. However, Hart and Risley’s data were correlational. That is, the researchers did not manipulate the quantity and quality of verbal interactions that parents had with their young children; they did not randomly assign some parents to provide one form of language experience and other parents to provide another and then measure any change in children’s development as a result of the manipulation. To suggest that differences in early language experiences cause differences in children’s vocabularies and school achievement requires the elimination of confounds—that is, variables that could account for the correlation because they lead to both strong verbal interaction from parents and strong verbal ability in children.

Shared genetics is one potential confound. Parents of higher socioeconomic status tend to have higher cognitive ability than parents of lower socioeconomic status, and socioeconomic status and cognitive ability are both heritable.11 So, shared genes could be a third variable that influences both the quality of language experiences that parents provide and children’s verbal ability. To test this possibility, behavioral geneticists have taken advantage of “experiments of nature” in which some children are raised by their biological parents (sharing both genes and environment) and some children are raised by adoptive parents (sharing only environment). In typical families (like those in Hart and Risley’s study), how similar are children to their parents, with whom they share both genes and a rearing environment? In adoptive families, how similar are children to their parents, with whom they share only a rearing environment?

In fact, the answers to these questions were first documented in the 1920s12 and have replicated on multiple occasions by myriad researchers13: In biological families, children resemble their parents in vocabulary and verbal ability; in adoptive families, they do not. The key implication is that Hart and Risley’s finding of a link between parents’ verbal behavior and their children’s verbal ability does not warrant an inference that parents’ verbal behavior influences their children’s verbal ability. The link is better explained by shared genes, because the association only reveals itself when parents and children are genetic relatives. Stated another way, the findings imply that the type of parents who provide high-quality language experiences to their children differ systematically from those who provide lower-quality experiences; and children who evoke high-quality verbal reactions from their parents differ systematically from those who do not. Because developmental psychologists and educators continue to interpret correlational data like Hart and Risley’s as evidence of the causal impact of early language experiences on verbal ability, they continue to push interventions that, in the end, are likely to be relatively less effective than interventions that acknowledge and address both environmental and genetic differences between individuals and families.

Another domain in which conflation of correlation with causation may be leading us astray is with microaggressions. In the article that popularized this term, microaggressions were defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”14 The term was initially applied in the context of race and ethnicity but is now applied much more broadly. One key finding from correlational research on microaggressions is that individuals who self-report being microaggressed against are more likely than others to struggle with mental health issues.15 The data are correlational, yet have been interpreted as causal: that is, that being microaggressed against causes mental health issues.16 As such, it is now common in both the academic and corporate world to offer or require employee training on the various phrases, words, and actions that might qualify as microaggressions. I am not suggesting that being microaggressed against does not actually have a negative effect on individuals’ well-being; the causal path is certainly plausible. However, the causal inference is not valid in the absence of true experimental research that imposes microaggressions on some individuals and not others, with subsequent measurement of pre-specified outcomes. To say otherwise is telling more than we know.

As Scott Lilienfeld pointed out in his article17 calling for more rigorous research on microaggressions, a glaring confound is the personality trait of negative emotionality (neuroticism): Individuals who are high in negative emotionality are particularly likely to perceive themselves as microaggressed against and individuals who are high in negative emotionality are susceptible to mental health issues. The possibility that negative emotionality underlies both experiencing microaggressions and mental health concerns is quite reasonable given that microaggressions have no precise definition but rather are defined entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation. I propose that microaggression workshops, to the degree that they are motivated by unwarranted assumptions of the causal impact of microaggressions on mental health, might actually backfire by making at-risk individuals more likely to perceive themselves as microaggressed against.

Indeed, in research that my colleagues and I presented last year, when we primed college students with the note that “people say all kinds of things, and sometimes they say things that can be harmful without even realizing it,” the students who scored higher in negative emotionality subsequently rated ambiguous statements like “You should take up running” to be more harmful than did students who scored low in negative emotionality. As Lukianoff and Haidt argued in The Coddling of the American Mind, microaggression training may not be preparing people to engage with each other respectfully (as it presumably aspires to), but rather to look for opportunities to take offense in others’ words.

Psychology Can Do Better

In the same way that psychological scientists have responded to the replication crisis by holding ourselves accountable for engaging in more responsible research and data analysis practices, I hope that psychological scientists can work together to overcome our tendency to infer causality from correlational data. How we overcome this tendency may depend on why, how, when, and to whom it happens. It is possible that, just like anyone else, psychologists have a difficult time distinguishing between correlation and causation; if that is the case, we need to supplement our scientific training to include more pointed practice with causal language and criteria for demonstrating causality.

Another possibility is that psychological scientists recognize unwarranted causal inferences when evaluating others’ research but miss it in their own, perhaps because of ideological and self-serving biases. If that is the case, we need to encourage individuals with competing viewpoints to provide constructive review of each other’s research, with correlation versus causation front of mind. It is also posible that scientists use unwarranted causal language intentionally, in an effort to draw more attention to their work. Luckily, recent research suggests that engaging in such causal “spin” is unnecessary, because press releases that are crafted with causal language and press releases that are crafted with non-causal language are picked up by news outlets at similar rates.

Regardless, it is up to psychological scientists to hold one another—and themselves—to a higher standard of (1) recognizing a causal statement when they see it, and (2) identifying whether or not the three criteria have been met for making that causal statement. In the scientific pursuit of truth, psychology must do better.

April L. Bleske-Rechek earned her BA in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1996) and her PhD in Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin (2001). She is currently a Psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

References:

1 Sackett, P. R., Borneman, M. J., & Connelly, B. S. (2008). High-stakes testing in higher education and employment: Appraising the evidence for validity and fairness. American Psychologist, 63, 215-227. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.4.215
2 Straus, M. A., & Paschall, M. J. (2009). Corporal punishment by mothers and development of children’s cognitive ability: A longitudinal study of two nationally representative age cohorts. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 18, 459-583. doi:10.1080/10926770903035168
3 Madsen, K. M., Hviid, A., Vestergaard, M., Schendel, D., Wolfhart, J. et al. (2002). A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. The New England Journal of Medicine, 347, 1477-1482. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa021134
Honda, H., Shimizu, Y., & Rutter, M. (2005). No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: A total population study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46, 572-579. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01425.x
4 Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12, 353-359. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00366
5 Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12, 353-359. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00366
6 Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2008). Exploding the self-esteem myth. In S. O. Lilienfeld, J. Ruscio, & S. J. Lynn (eds.), Navigating the mindfield: A user’s guide to distinguishing science from pseudoscience in mental health, pp. 575-587. Amherst, NY, US: Prometheus Books.
7 Adams, R. C., Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Barrington, A., Williams, A., Boivin, J., Chambers, C. D.,& Bott, l. (2017). How readers understand causal and correlational expressions used in news headlines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 23, 1-14. doi:10.1037/xap0000100
Mueller, J. F., & Coon, H. M. (2013). Undergraduates’ ability to recognize correlational and causal language before and after explicit instruction. Teaching of Psychology, 40, 288-293. doi:10.1177/0098628313501038
8 Lazarus, C., Haneef, R., Ravaud, P., & Boutron, I. (2015). Classification and prevalence of spin in abstracts of non-randomized studies evaluating an intervention. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 15, 85. doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0079-x
9 Robinson, D. H., Levin, J. R., Thomas, G. D., Pituch, K. A., & Vaugh, S. (2007). The incidence of ‘causal’ statements in teaching-and-learning research journals. American Educational Research Journal, 44, 400–413. doi:10.3102/0002831207302174
10 Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
11 Marioni, R. E., Davies, G., Hayward, C., Liewald, D., Kerr, S. M., Campbell, A.,…Deary, I. J. (2014). Molecular genetic contributions to socioeconomic status and intelligence. Intelligence, 44, 26-32. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2014.02.006
Trzaskowski, M., Harlaar, N., Arden, R., Krapohl, E., Rimfeld, K., McMillan, A.,…Plomin, R. (2014). Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children’s intelligence. Intelligence, 42, 83-88. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2013.11.002
12 Burks, B. S. (1928). The relative influence of nature and nurture upon mental development; a comparative study of foster parent-foster child resemblance and true parent-true child resemblance. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Pt. I, 219-316.
13 Leahy, A. M. (1935). A study of adopted children as a method of investigating nature-nurture. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 30, 281-287. doi:10.1080/01621459.1935.10504170
Neiss, M., & Rowe, D. C. (2000). Parental education and child’s verbal IQ in adoptive and biological families in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Behavior Genetics, 30, 487-495.
Wadsworth, S. J., Corley, R. P., Hewitt, J. K., Plomin, R., & DeFries, J. C. (2002). Parent-offspring resemblance for reading performance at 7, 12 and 16 years of age in the Colorado Adoption Project. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43, 769-774. doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00085
14 Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62, 271-286. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.62.4.271
15 Nadal, K. L., Griffin, K. E., Wong, Y., Hamit, S., & Rasmus, M. (2014). The impact of racial microaggressions on mental health: Counseling implications for clients of color. Journal of Counseling & Development, 92, 57-66. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.2014.00130.x
16 Note the causal language in the title of the article: Nadal, K. L., Griffin, K. E., Wong, Y., Hamit, S., & Rasmus, M. (2014). The impact of racial microaggressions on mental health: Counseling implications for clients of color. Journal of Counseling & Development, 92, 57-66. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.2014.00130.x
17 Lilienfeld, S. (2017). Microaggressions: Strong claims, inadequate evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 138–169. doi:10.1177/1745691616659391

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## Comments

1. > No ethical researcher plans on randomly assigning parents to engage in varying degrees of corporal punishment to assess its isolated effects on children’s IQ.

   Why not? An article pointing out failures of reasoning relies on a question-begging assertion? Millions of people have been spanked and lived to tell the tale. In fact, most people were spanked as children until very recently, including national leaders in the professions, academia, writers, politicians, etc.

   Mote, meet beam.

2. Good article, hit all but one of the major points: Causality can be reversed. Just because I go outside and get wet doesn’t mean it’s raining, but going outside when it’s raining without protective rain gear does mean I will get wet. This is the fourth flaw: Where correlations exists due to causation, directionality of causation needs to be independently evaluated and not assumed.

   This is the fundamental flaw with the “disparate impacts” doctrine. Policies are evaluated on their racial impact for implicit bias via looking at impact and not policy. For example, you pass a law regarding speeding, and then check to see if any group has a share of tickets out of proportion to its population.

   The two flaws are the same: Minorities are not universally distributed either socio-economically or regionally. The regional one most people get- if your local area is 80% African American, yes they will get more than 13% of tickets- but the socio-economic most miss.

   If 90% of your tickets go to the poor, and your local African American community is 30% of your local population but 60% of the local poor population (as in an inner city neighborhood), they should be getting 54% of the tickets, not 30%. Assuming that a racial animus is the sole explanatory factor is where disparate impacts falls apart. While some would argue that being poor is due to historic racial inequities (fine), the issue isn’t racial, it’s a side-effect of being poor. Fix being poor and the issue goes away.

3. This was supposed to be a reply to Jonfrum

   Because there’s a difference between blind, random assignment to conditions and looking at situations that happen naturally.

   I’m a teacher/researcher and I constantly have to struggle with this limitation. Let’s say I want to test the effectiveness of a reading program for beginning readers during 1st grade. Do you really think a group of parents are going to be willing to let their children be the control group who get no treatment? Do you think the school district who gets funds based on student performance will be willing to let this happen?

   When you’re doing research on rats, you can test all the conditions you want that give you a complete and broad ranging picture of the effects of what it is you’re studying, because you don’t care what happens to the rats. But lets say you want to study the effects of spanking on children. Are you really going to assign some students to the condition where they get spanked regularly, brutally, for no cause, over an extended period of time, just to see the limits of how spanking affects people?

4. If spanking is to be tested scientifically I am willing to beat the crap out of your snivelling little brats. For science. Or find a sufficient number of formerly spanked individuals to study. But hurry before they all age out.

5. system:

   > Another possibility is that psychological scientists recognize unwarranted causal inferences when evaluating others’ research but miss it in their own, perhaps because of ideological and self-serving biases.

   I was waiting for the author to get around to this point. This seems to me to be the best explanation for the conflation of correlation with causation. “Ideological and self-serving biases” might be the single biggest problem affecting good scholarship in psychology, since it is implicated in the replication crisis as well.

6. The dangers of the post ergo propter hoc fallacy are very much a concern of the law when considering the admissibility of evidence and what probative value certain evidence in proving that one event caused another. I would suggest that a school course on the rules of evidence would be very useful in combatting the prevalence of illogical thinking in society today.

7. Coming off as a little crazy here lol

8. Sigh. I am. A little

9. “if self-esteem and academic success are causally connected, it is academic success that precedes self-esteem, not the reverse!”

   I find it rather bizarre that anyone would consider this surprising. It is possible that higher self esteem leads to better performance although, far from obvious or certain, but it is obvious that success and acheivement in any domain is likely to lead to higher self esteem.

   I can see that even ‘obvious’ things need testing because there is a chance that they are wrong and that there is, for example, confusion between cause and correlation, but it says something about psychology that evidence for the obvious, commonsense relation ebtween acheivement and success is viewed as worthy of an exclamation point.

10. When I was a schoolboy (more than 50 years ago) we were taught to write up our scientific experiments in the third person - so we wrote “A 100 cc of water was added to a beaker and then heated to boiling point” rather than the more modern “I boiled 100 cc of water”. The point of this stylistic exercise was to write dispassionately rather than using emotionally loaded ordinary speech with its built in assumptions about what was happening.

    Now it’s tough to divorce daily life speech usage expectations. Not only do cause, effect and correlation get jumbled together but many scientists discussing evolutionary processes still use teleological phrases (usually inappropriate) to describe unguided processes. Ordinary speech imposes a ‘design’ worldview by default.

    Perhaps we should all use E-Prime (see Wikipedia) in scientific work. But it’s hard to give up ordinary usage.

11. I think because it’s assumed to be harmful, and you don’t want to induce people to do things that you think will harm individuals who haven’t agreed to be part of your study.

    That said, I’ve seen a number of economic research articles on VoxDev where the research is offering some program to a subset of whatever group they’re monitoring (say, pick a study population and then offer half a particular type of vocational training). It’s not quite as good on the narrow question as full random assignment, but then it’s also actually measuring the entirety of something actionable rather than just a bunch of individually useless bits and pieces.

12. Seems like a good post for a test post, lol

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3. Max York says
   - August 4, 2019

   As a child, I was spanked quite a lot, I think justifiably, and since I have been an adult, more than a few people have said that I am “crazy.”
   PROBLEM ONE: Did the spanking (1) cause me to be “crazy” or (2) prevent me from becoming far “crazier,” or (3) do nothing other than to make me more cautious about when to exhibit “crazy” behavior?
   PROBLEM TWO: Define “crazy.” The people who called me “crazy” had no access to my actual mental processes, because I do not disclose them. These people were actually talking about my behavior, and assumed that there was some “crazy” mental process responsible for it.
   PROBLEM THREE: Conflation of mental processes with behavior in any study of a possible relationship between spanking and later development.

   Reply
4. Tedd Judd says
   - August 4, 2019

   Dr. Bleske-Rechek does us all a service by pointing out this other crisis in psychology. Her research on the language of causality and its use in reviewed psychological research is particularly helpful in documenting this problem.
   I am amazed, however, that neither she herself, nor her editors, nor any commentators have yet pointed out that she has failed in her own criteria when it comes to her recommendations for addressing this crisis. She claims “that psychological scientists have responded to the replication crisis by holding ourselves accountable for engaging in more responsible research and data analysis practices” without presenting data that this has occurred and has been effective. Essentially, she offers us little more than hope: “I hope that psychological scientists can work together to overcome our tendency to infer causality from correlational data.” She speculates that perhaps psychologists have a difficult time distinguishing between correlation and causation and recommends more education if that is that case, with no evidence that such can be effective. I have not systematically researched psychology curricula, but, in my experience as a psychologist, correlation vs causation, including criteria for demonstrating causality, occupies a prominent place in virtually all scientific psychological training. On the face of it, if more training is part of the solution then such training will need to be qualitatively different, such as her suggestion regarding more pointed practice with causal language. It is an empirical question, however, whether or not such training would be effective, and should be tested and replicated in controlled experiments before recommending such an intervention.
   She also raises the “possibility that psychological scientists recognize unwarranted causal inferences when evaluating others’ research but miss it in their own, perhaps because of ideological and self-serving biases.” This is also a testable empirical question (a hypothesis). Her own research suggests that this is very unlikely, since she found that half of peer-reviewed research in psychology contained unwarranted causal statements from correlational research, so either psychological scientists do not recognize unwarranted causal inferences when evaluating others’ research, or they don’t care. She recommends that “we need to encourage individuals with competing viewpoints to provide constructive review of each other’s research, with correlation versus causation front of mind (sic).” Her research, however, suggests that this may be ineffective. Furthermore, this is, again, an empirical question that can and should be tested before making recommendations.
   She concludes that it is up to psychological scientists to hold one another—and themselves—to a higher standard. We haven’t done a very good job so far (that’s my personal judgment). Psychologists are experts in behavior change. My personal suggestion is that we consider and test a broader range of options for fixing this problem, including the possibility of looking beyond ourselves.
   I would also like to take exception with Dr. Bleske-Rechek on a minor matter. She cites “the premier professional organization in psychology, the Association for Psychological Science.” APS (www.psychologicalscience.org) has 30,000 members, a modest public profile, 6 journals, a 31-year history, a one-paragraph Code of Conduct, and a focus on research and teaching. The American Psychological Association (www.apa.org) has 118,000 members, a prominent public profile, over 75 journals, several book and video series, several databases, a 127-year history, an extensive Code of Ethics, and 54 divisions covering the broad diversity of professional psychology. APS describes itself as “the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders.” They confine their boasting to scientific psychology, not to the entire field of psychology (clinical practice, industrial practice, and many other domains) as Dr. Bleske-Rechek has asserted. Dr. Bleske-Rechek’s “premier” is a value judgment, not an empirical question; I see APA as the premier professional organization in psychology in the US, and I know of no international rivals of similar magnitude. Readers are free to make their own judgments in this regard, but I find it disingenuous for Dr. Bleske-Rechek to make such a claim without some caveats, especially considering that it was an APS journal that rejected her research presented here.
   Tedd Judd, PhD, ABPP-CN

   Reply
5. lfstevens says
   - August 5, 2019

   Note that Judea Pearl has developed rigorous math to aid in the separation of correlation from causality. It goes by the name “causal model”.

   Reply
6. Larry says
   - August 5, 2019

   Oh…the problem is so bad in the social sciences that it may be that only studies that have been successfully replicated should make it into print.

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7. Fraunt Hall says
   - August 5, 2019

   It is amazing that the author, while expressing concerns about the problem of conflating correlation and cause in the sphere of Psychology fails to note or consider that it is a crucial issue in many areas of life, such as law and the hard sciences. Jeremiah, in a comment to this article, refers to the problem of such confusion in relation to matters of evidential proof in courts of law. I know that such conflation exists in many areas of human endeavour relating to hard science issues, especially difficult ones like climate science, where the variables involved are verging on astronomical numbers.

   Reply

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