What perfect timing. Today’s Wall Street Journal ran an article about John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist who says most published research findings are wrong. He published an essay, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” in 2005.
Well, not really. But I made you look, didn’t I?
Maybe you missed the headlines a couple of weeks ago about research that claims to show that girls like pink, but they caught my eye. It must have been all the pretty pink headlines and flowery language [girly sigh]. Maybe I’m making a magenta mountain out of a muted-pink molehill, but let’s just say this were a study on, say, the war in Iraq. I believe this little molehill indicates a much larger problem in journalism that goes like this:
Let’s start with the study.
Researchers from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom published the results of a color-preference study on 208 college-age (20-26) volunteers in the Aug. 21, 2007, issue of Current Biology. The article was announced in a press release issued by Cell Press, which publishes Current Biology and several other scientific journals. Current Biology is a peer-reviewed journal, which means that materials submitted for publication are reviewed or “refereed” by a panel of experts in the same field to determine if they meet the standards of their scientific discipline.
Current Biology has 1,709 subscribers, and it’s distributed at about 30 conferences a year. At $179 a year, I doubt your average news consumer would subscribe just to read this article. I doubt they would even pay the $30 I did to download and read the 1,297-word article (a couple of pages) and its supplemental data. Apparently none of the media outlets that published the press release would either, although they really should have.
Or maybe it should be freely available, as Bad Science blogger, Dr. Ben Goldacre (who has a few things to say about the article), points out:
Unless you have an Athens login, you are not allowed to read what the researchers actually said, instead of what the media said they said. Because although they are publicly funded academics at the University of Newcastle, and although this work has been publicised in every major mainstream media outlet in Britain and the US, and although the journal is edited by academics you fund, and paid for by subscriptions from university libraries … the actual academic article is behind a paywall, with a payment model geared towards institutions, rather than interested individuals.
Bad luck you. I guess you have to rely on journalists.
According to the supplemental data, researchers tested three groups:
Why the tests weren’t exactly the same in each setting, researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked. When were the tests done? 2007? 2006? 2005? Researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked.
The first group also completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which scores feminity and masculinity based on subjects rating themselves from 1 to 7 on a list of adjectives and phrases, such as self-reliant, yielding, dominant and soft-spoken. Why? Researchers didn’t say, although they found a “significant” correlation between feminity scores (of 46 females) and the preference test. Why this group and not the others? Researchers didn’t say. Nobody asked.
Cell’s press release said, quoting researcher Anya Hurlbert:
The universal favorite color for all people appears to be blue.
“On top of that, females have a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, and this shifts their color preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colors in comparison with others.”
Actually, Hurlbert wrote in the Current Biology article:
On average, all subjects give positive weight to the S-(L+M) contrast component (“bluish” contrasts), with British females weighting it significantly higher than British males. (Emphasis added.)
That means 92 women preferred blue even more than 79 men. Do we need a new headline?
Girls like blue even more than boys do!
The article also said, “On average, all males give large negative weight to the L-M [red-green] axis, whereas all females weight it slightly positively.” (Emphasis added.) New headline?
Boys hate red; girls think it’s OK
To rule out cultural influences on color preference, researchers also tested 18 Chinese women and 19 Chinese men. Researchers thought they would get a higher preference for red from the Chinese participants because, they said, red signifies “good luck” in Chinese culture. (I don’t know. Isn’t that like saying the Irish like green?) Results were similar, thus proving to researchers that color preference had nothing to do with culture and everything to do with biology.
Which brings us to this gem:
We speculate that this [girls’ preference for pink] sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour. The hunter-gatherer theory proposes that female brains should be specialized for gathering-related tasks and is supported by studies of visual spatial abilities.
“Gatherer” females apparently had to identify red fruit among all the green leaves and be highly aware of changes in skin color because of their role as “empathizers.” Sooooo … it’s a scientific fact that a small group of 20-something 21st century women “prefer” reddish hues over men who dislike it because of evolution. Remember, cultural influences were removed as a factor because the Chinese participants didn’t like red any more than the others, even though, according to researchers, they should have.
All-righty.
Here‘s what one blogger had to say about the scientific aspects of the article. Here’s what the Bad Science blogger/doctor said about it. (Red Jenny tipped me off to Bad Science.)
What’s the point of the research, and how will results be used? Researchers didn’t say, except that they plan to study color preference in infants, and perhaps they need funding for that. Except that research apparently has already been done, according to a May 8, 2005, article by BBC News. Even so, nobody asked.
Who’s funding this research and why? Researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked.
However, Unilever was acknowledged for supporting co-researcher Yazhu Ling with a studentship in a 2002 article in Perception and a 2004 article in the Journal of Vision. Unilever was also listed under “support” for a presentation on color perceptionby Hurlbert and Ling at the 29 European Conference on Visual Perception in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 21, 2006.
While studentships are usually rare because of limited funding, Unilever’s studentship funding seems to be plentiful, offered at Cambridge University, the University of Manchester, the University of Nottingham, the Imperial College London, the University College London, and University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to name a few. Unilever even established its own “world-leading research group” by investing £13M (about $26 million) in the Unilever Centre for Molecular for Science Informatics at Cambridge University, opening a new building in 2000.
Unilever provides financial support for research through its Port Sunlight office in Liverpool, which boasts more than “700 scientists and engineers from various backgrounds and nationalities working to create innovative products for consumers around the world. The global brands our teams contribute to include Dove, Sunsilk, Lynx/Axe, Cif, Persil/Omo and Domestos.” This work, the Web site continues, results in more than 100 patent filings and about 140 peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations. Oh, and by the way, Unilever also created “The Gamekillers,” a television series set to debut on MTV on Sept. 21, to sell Axe antiperspirant, according to an article in the Sept. 13, 2007, Wall Street Journal.
How to sell products to consumers?
“Psychologists, social scientists, and experts in cognitive neuroscience form another important team — Consumer Science Insight — whose role is to investigate how a consumer’s ‘need’ or ‘desire’ translates into a product.”
Let’s check out the headlines. This one’s from Cell’s press release:
Girls prefer pink, or at least a redder shade of blue
Psst! Wouldn’t a “redder shade of blue” be purple?
Other headlines
Study: Why Girls Like Pink (Time.com, Aug. 20, 2007)
Why women love a red, red rose (USATODAY, Aug. 20, 2007)
Girls Really Do Prefer Pink (HealthDay/Yahoo! News, Aug. 20, 2007)
The HealthDay article was picked up by U.S. News & World Report, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and several others. It was even picked up by healthfinder.gov, “Your Guide to Reliable Health Information, sponsored by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.”
Color biases may be nature, not nurture (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 21, 2007)
At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink (The Times, Aug. 21, 2007)
Why girls ‘really do prefer pink’ (BBC, Aug. 21, 2007)
Girls Prefer Pink, Or At Least A Redder Shade of Blue (Science Daily, Aug. 22, 2007)
I saved the best for last. No, there’s nothing special about the headline. It’s about the same as all the others. The article is the same.
Girls really do prefer pink, study shows (Telegraph, Aug. 21, 2007)
Oh, but this … this takes the cake. The Telegraph’s science editor, Dr. Roger Highfield, made a video version of the article, complete with color-screen changes with a snap of his fingers and a tone of authority and finality. As in, this is the truth, this is scientific fact, these researchers said so, I’m a doctor and I say so, amen.
P.S. The good Dr. Highfield used to work for Unilever.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Damien Cave wrote an article for The New York Times on Aug. 26, 2007, Hear a General, Hug a Sheik: Congress Does the Iraq Circuit. They’re getting warmer but still have a lot of work to do. Hope they keep it up.
All you see among the talking heads is that another soldier was killed today. It must be taken into perspective. How many people were killed in Washington, D.C., at the same time? — Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., criticizing media coverage of Iraq after his visit there when rockets damaged an American-occupied hotel in Baghdad (Bucks County Courier Times, Sept. 29, 2003).
Perspective?
According to this chart, Washington, D.C., had about 250 murders in 2003. That’s 4.8 people killed every week.
In 2003 in Iraq:
That’s 12,930 people who died in Iraq, or 248 a week, the equivalent of people killed in D.C. in the entire year. What exactly was his point anyway? When just “another soldier was killed today,” what does he want the “talking heads” to report?
Maybe someone who works for the Ministry of Truth government can answer that.
Susan Phalen is a senior adviser for Iraq communications for the U.S. Department of Stateand oversees the Global Outreach Team for the U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Section. She has been to Iraq nine times as a public-affairs team leader. Phalen spoke Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., at a luncheon held by the Conservative Women’s Network of the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute. The speech aired on C-SPAN. (I can’t get the video link to work, but maybe it will show up in the archives.)
She talked about “what’s happening in Iraq that you’re not getting from the media.” She described her work as “fun” several times.
In an interview published April 9, 2007, in the Omaha World-Herald, Phalen said:
Our goal is to try to show the American taxpayers what’s happening over here and what the story is beyond the bloodshed and the car bombs.
Almost in the same breath, she described living in the Green Zone where “rockets and mortars sometimes fly inside and explode.” She said that a rocket recently blew up just outside of a building where she was, killing several people and wounding several others.
Those of us on the inside tried to rush back out because we could hear screaming. But we couldn’t get out. They locked the building down. It was a very intense and emotional little while.
Yeah, sounds like fun! to me.
In an interview published April 26, 2007, by the Lincoln Journal-Star, the story Phalen told went “beyond the blood and the bombs” to the “good news” of Iraq. On this particular day, she visited the Army hospital in the Green Zone and found six children:
Hold on. I just lost my train of thought there for a second. Someone help me out here (because the reporter certainly didn’t). What was the “good news” part of this story again?
Back to her luncheon speech, Phalen criticized journalists for not leaving Baghdad to cover the rest of Iraq, which she does regularly, under full security by the U.S. military. They’re missing out on some good stories, she said.
Sigh. Tsk, tsk. Those journalists. They just don’t know how to have fun!
Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi was removed from Iraq for a “scheduled vacation” after she described an unfun Iraq in an e-mail to family and friends in 2004. It leaked and made the rounds in cyberspace. She wrote a diary for Columbia Journalism Review, eventually returned from vacation (newly assigned to Lebanon) and wrote an article about Iraq in 2006.
Sig Christenson, a military writer for the San Antonio Express-News, was in Baghdad the day Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., toured a Baghdad market in April 2007, declared it fun! and then later complained in the Washington Post about how journalists reported only bad news. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said the Baghdad market was just like a normal outdoor market back home in Indiana.
Christenson called bullshit in an Aug. 6, 2007, article on Nieman Watchdog. He said nothing in Iraq is normal, except death:
You can’t put lipstick on this little pig and pass it off as life in Indiana.
Yeah, but is it fun?
Metro section, page 1 (above the fold, 4-column photograph)
Local soldier, killed in Iraq, comes home (photo credit: Chris Urso/Tribune).
Page 1
Teaser to metro front-page article about soldier.
…
The St. Petersburg Times covered the story, and it has a section called “Our Casualties of War.” A local television station also covered the story.
…
Well done.
The Wall Street Journal published “General Petraeus Needs Time,” a commentary by Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to the U.S. president and director of strategic initiatives, today. In the article, Wehner wonders why “some critics of the war are unwilling to hear good news of any sort” coming from Iraq.
Yeah, everyone is tired of the war, he says, which has been full of mistakes, misjudgments and 3,600 deaths of American troops. But, hey, that’s the nature of war, he says. Besides, Baghdad is returning to normal, he argues, with “soccer leagues, amusement parks and vibrant market places.”
To emphasize that point, the above photograph of a soccer fan celebrating Iraq’s win over Vietnam in the Asian Cup on July 21, ran with the article. (Photo credit: AP/Khalid Mohammed)
But what about the celebrations of Iraq’s win over South Korea on July 25? The ones that turned tragic with two suicide bombings that killed 50 people and injured 130 in Baghdad?
I guess running a photograph of that might have messed up the whole point of the article.
Update: In other news, Iraqi leaders apparently don’t want to give Petraeus more time, and the prime minister has asked George W. Bush to remove the general.
A national newspaper in Norway ran this photograph of a flag-draped coffin of a Norwegian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. This is how the newspaper covered it on the Norwegian pages.
This has not yet been mentioned in U.S. newspapers.
Local Marine, 25, shot and killed … in his hometown.
I am not saying this story does not belong on the front page. As I said before, though, I wonder what is behind the decisions about story placement. Did someone from the newspaper attend the funeral, which was held this morning? Will they run that on the front page tomorrow? With a flag-draped coffin? Would that be OK because he did not die in Iraq?
In other news, a Florida soldier who died in Afghanistan was mentioned in an Associated Press brief on page 11.
Metro section, page 4
Local soldier, 20, dies in Iraq.
Metro front page
Page 1
Nothing but teasers
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradition in terms.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor of Journalism
Discuss.
