Chapter 2: Further Reading

Essential Sources

Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Boivin, J., et al. (2014). "The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: Retrospective observational study." BMJ, 349, g7015. The landmark study showing that 40% of university press releases exaggerate. Essential reading for understanding Stage 2 of the pipeline.

Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). "Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes." Psychological Science, 29(7), 1159–1177. The large-scale replication that substantially reduced the marshmallow test effect size and showed socioeconomic factors explained most of the correlation. The paper that should have changed the popular narrative but largely didn't.

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). "Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance." Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368. The original power posing paper. Compare it to Ranehill et al. (2015) and Carney's 2016 retraction statement for the full pipeline journey.

Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., et al. (2015). "Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women." Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656. The first major replication failure for power posing, with a sample nearly five times the original.

Bohannon, J. (2015). "I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How." Gizmodo. The journalist's own account of deliberately creating and promoting a bad study to demonstrate the pipeline's lack of quality filters. A vivid, readable demonstration.

Haber, N., Smith, E. R., Moscoe, E., et al. (2018). "Causal language and strength of inference in academic and media articles shared in social media (CLAIMS): A systematic review." PLOS ONE, 13(5), e0196346. Systematic analysis of how causal language is used (and misused) in the pipeline from academic papers to media coverage. Found that 58% of papers were accurately represented.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). "The weirdest people in the world?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. The paper that coined the WEIRD acronym and documented the massive sampling bias in behavioral science. Essential for understanding why findings from psychology labs may not generalize.

Mischel, W. (2014). The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. Little, Brown. Mischel's own popular book. More nuanced than the viral version but still significantly simpler than the research warrants. Worth reading as an example of a researcher contributing to their own finding's simplification.

Cuddy, A. (2015). Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Little, Brown. Cuddy's expansion of the power posing concept. Worth reading alongside the replication failures for a study in how the pipeline operates even when the source is the researcher.

Ritchie, S. (2020). Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Metropolitan Books. Covers the structural problems in science communication, including the incentives at each stage of the pipeline.

Online Resources

Carney, D. R. (2016). "My position on 'Power Poses.'" Statement posted on faculty webpage. The co-author's public retraction — a rare and instructive document in the history of psychology's self-correction.

Retraction Watch. A blog that tracks retractions and corrections in scientific publishing. Useful for following the correction side of the pipeline.

Google Scholar. The most accessible tool for finding original research papers. When you encounter a psychology claim, search for the original study and compare the abstract to the popular version.