I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, “We gave high school seniors a hearty slap o

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2024-06-11 20:00:04

I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, “We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT.” 1

I wanted to get up and yell: “EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT.”

If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get—does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius?

Or—much more likely—the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud.

Those are the options. Asking a bunch of softball questions (“Which result was your favorite?”) is not a reasonable response. That’s like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat actually for real, not a magic trick, and then asking them, “What’s the rabbit’s name?”