Homophobe? You're most likely gay.

[Greatguardian]

There are so many things wrong with that study. But there's a whole lot more wrong with how its conclusions are being misrepresented.

Oh well. To be perfectly honest, I don't care enough about pseudoscience to meander around the messes it makes - not when they have the potential to be this much of a clusterfuck. Enjoy.

[Cream Soda]

[Mazmaz]

Read a bit of it. I have a bunch of stuff due for school though. I'll come back to it in a couple of days.

[hey]

This is America. Accepting/rejecting a news headline outright is fine, but actually reading through it and thinking about the article's content is a no no. Mazmaz clearly hates America and is probably a terrorist.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif

Always assume all science related news reports are bullshit until you read the actual research. The only thing that even has a reasonable chance of being right is the conclusions.

You'd get a more accurate idea of what was done by google translating the actual paper through 3 different languages, and then back.

[Mazmaz]

To be fair, the way they measured the "sub-conscious gayness" or whatever was about as ridiculous as I gathered it was from the articles.

Implicit sexual orientation. Implicit sexual orientation was
measured with a reaction time task (similar to that used by
Fazio et al., 1995). Participants were presented with words and
pictures on a computer screen and asked to place them into the
category “gay” or the category “straight,” using the Q and P
keys of the keyboard, respectively. Before each trial, participants
were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or
the word “others,” which was flashed for 35 ms. The prime was
masked for 35 ms, followed by a 35-ms blank screen, and
finally the target word or picture. The target words were “gay,”
“straight,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual.” Target pictures
were images depicting straight and gay couples, shown in
Figure 1. Sixty trials in total were used, the first 10 for practice
and the latter 50 for data collection. Responses were log transformed
and only me–gay and me–straight pairings were used in
the present analyses. Me–straight reaction times were used to
account for individual differences in response time. Implicit gay
orientation was computed by subtracting gay latency from
straight latency; as such, higher scores reflected a faster association
of “me” with gay and a lower association (slower
responses) of “me” with straight.

[Psion]

Pretty sure it's a fairly standard way of testing various biases. I remember playing around with that type of testing on a site that did that with various issues, such as racism.

The scores it spit back reflected my personal views quite well too. :D

[Churchill]

Oh well that makes the report accurate then.

[Jeherrit]

People seriously expect an inflammatory psych study to be good for anything besides trolling?

Seriously, just relax and let the gayness surge into you. It'll be less painfull that way.

[shaggnix]

its an attempt at taking a purely subjective/abstract phenomenon and trying to form solid empirical data supporting it. any psychological experiment like this is going to have its inherent flaws due to the subjective nature of the material that is the focus of it. until someone invents some kind of brain scanner that can download your thoughts and print them onto paper there can be no solid answers.
that being said, i have seen various forms of "i'm not gay!" overcompensation. from that dude who had to bang as many chicks as possible but couldn't ever stay with one - and then came out. gay haters that ended up coming out. jesus-loving-gay haters that came out and went unitarian. oh, and all those republican congressman/senators who spout anti-gay drivel and carrying family values banners who end up getting caught with the page boys or in a public mens room working the glory hole. whos the one who had his wife believing someone stole his credit card and kept using it to get male escorts, and yet he refused to cancel the card?

[Alleya]

To be fair, the way they measured the "sub-conscious gayness" or whatever was about as ridiculous as I gathered it was from the articles.

This is a standard, well established, and thoroughly researched method.

[Kuya]

I was wondering whether the people criticizing the method they were using had themselves investigated or looked into whether the method itself was standardized or validated, you know, how an actual scientist would go about criticizing a method.

[Alleya]

I was wondering whether the people criticizing the method they were using had themselves investigated or looked into whether the method itself was standardized or validated, you know, how an actual scientist would go about criticizing a method.

The greatest obstacle for psychology is that everyone thinks they're a goddamned expert, but their own brains are way more complicated and subtle than their brains realize. It's kinda ironic.

[Kuya]

More so on this forum, where much lip service is payed to science, but there is little understanding of the scientific method. Much less how the scientific method is applied in practice in numerous other fields.

[BaneTheBrawler]

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. "


Totally got that quote from Civ V, but I don't remember who said it. I may have mixed it up a bit too. Anyway, psychology is kinda squishy imo. Too many exceptions.

[Ghost_Wheel22]

Psychology is best described as

[Kuya]

One thing i'm never sure of, is when i see people criticizing psychology. As someone who's studied psychology, i know plenty of things you could whine about the field, but since most lay persons understand psychology as being Freud, i'm never quite sure whether the criticisms are legitimate, or born out of personal stupidity.

[hey]

I was wondering whether the people criticizing the method they were using had themselves investigated or looked into whether the method itself was standardized or validated, you know, how an actual scientist would go about criticizing a method.

That requires way too much effort.

[Byrthnoth]

It's because psychology deals with nothing but intervening variables that are nebulously related to our individual mental constructs and poorly related to biology.

Things like the implicit association test are great and all, but do you really believe that the difference in latency between responses in two situations has been rigorously connected to "implicitly" disliking one particular group or another, even when that dislike conflicts with your expressly stated beliefs? Do you even think that's possible?

10 seconds on google using a phrase that you've used returned this: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/zea/54/1/14/

One way to read the abstract is: "We have shown that implicit and explicit attitudes aren't necessarily the same thing."
Aka: "We're inaccurately measuring what you think you believe and calling it Implicit."
PS. "sometimes strong?" "we added more degrees of freedom and it fit better?" Do these guys actually get PhDs?

Social-history-wise, the IAT got popular because it showed that everyone is secretly racist against black people, including black people. If you haven't noticed from the Trayvon case, people being racist makes for good news and the IAT got a lot of press. For the psychology field, it was very interesting that the researchers could show a strong effect on latency that was correlated to the color of the people they were displaying that wasn't very well correlated to explicit attitude (people genuinely believe they aren't racist) and pretty much couldn't be compensated for by the subjects. Their interpretation was that this showed an "implicit" attitude. Now, problems with this interpretation.
1) Because implicit and explicit attitude are not correlated, it is unclear how well this relates to behavior.
2) There are various factors (like, as far as I can tell, novelty) that still haven't been controlled for.
3) Black people are secretly racist against black people? If we drop the conspiracy theories for a second, shouldn't that be a red flag?


Either way, just showing up and going, "Stop doubting the method guys, it has been validated" is pretty dumb when dealing with anything in psychology. Validated to show what?

[Alleya]

Indeed, your 30 seconds on google trumps this 4 year degree and any form of criticism or dissent in science invalidates findings you find inconvenient--just like with evolution. Good day sir.

[Byrthnoth]

Yeah, or maybe I'm a BS Biochemist with a BA Biology/Psychology in a PhD Neuroscience program and I've had this discussion before multiple times.

PS. The paper supports the use of the IAT.