This fake study ruined a rising star's academic career: How it was debunked

[@TheCARRack]

i remember reading about the durably reducing transphobia study years ago. cool to hear about its history

[@Areveny]

Thanks for watching the video! It's a bit ironic that the follow-up was also published in Science, since part of this whole story I didn't touch on was the controversy in the academic publishing community about replicability and the role of different parties (coauthors, peer reviewers) to continuously vet a paper that they're releasing. A bit of insider(?) knowledge I have about Durably Reducing Transphobia: the study design involves cash compensation for taking the initial and follow-up surveys (up to $30). That is described in the supplementary materials. This is done to mitigate attrition/dropout when people don't provide any measurement after the treatment which can wreck the power of your experiment. This was a study design that Broockman and Kalla were pretty excited about at the time where they found that you can use a smaller sample size as long as people complete the full course of the study. Cash incentives were a way to encourage that behavior (and might save money compared to having to canvas people who never complete a follow-up). Cheers!

[@MissEvieYT]

She yet again cooked with this one I fear

[@IronGland]

Another banger

[@kahlzun]

I can understand someone expanding on data if they didn't get enough of it, but complete fabrication seems like just a poor idea. This was going to get caught out eventually.

[@Areveny]

Unfortunately eventually can be a long time. A recent example from this year was an Alzheimer's paper that was retracted over concerns of image manipulation only after 15 years and over 2500 citations: www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images. Though certainly as you say this study was exceptionally blatant.

[@bigbone_99]

New Arveny vid? 👀