YouTube: The Fall of a Superstar Psychologist
The YouTube algorithm once again suggested another great video from the channel quant. The controversy surrounding Dan Ariely and his studies is still ongoing and has since been covered in other videos and podcasts, but this video is the first time I heard about it.
The controversy caught me by surprise as someone who has read Ariely's best-selling book, Predictable Irrational, and bought into the idea that nudges in process and application design can lead to better results. But something strange happened when other researchers tried to apply or replicate his studies: they couldn't. As people looked into the data used in the studies, they realized that there are inconsistencies.
The smoking gun is from the data supposedly delivered by people applying for car insurance where they need to give the number of miles driven. The numbers don't follow a typical bell curve distribution seem to cut off at 50'000 miles. This is what can be expected if the number is generated by the RANDOM formula on Microsoft Excel. Furthermore, the underlying Excel files seem to show signs of manual edits since there are different fonts used in the same sheet.
Dan Ariely has denied any wrongdoing and there is a possibility that someone else might have fabricated the data. However, this still doesn't look good since he should've checked the data as the main author in the published studies. And this has real-world consequences since resources have been wasted by people trying to use these findings only to find out that it doesn't make any difference in the outcome.
This is the first video from this YouTube channel and it got viral straight away. Most likely because it was published soon after the controversy got into mainstream news. But I do hope that there will be more videos coming on this channel.
