I think we have established that peer review is not a worthwhile process of quality control for scholarly papers.
Still, there needs to be something. Take this “research” reported in the Guardian and picked up by the Australian Fairfax papers. The conclusion seems to have been that listening to “pro-social” (sorry for all the quote marks – I can’t let readers think these are my words) songs makes you act act more nicely soon after.
His experiments took groups of students and split them at random into those who listened individually either to socially-conscious songs or those with a neutral message, and then used various ways to measure the apparent effect. In one, after the music had stopped, a researcher “accidentally” knocked a cup of pencils from a table and paused briefly before beginning to collect them.
On average, those who had heard songs like Michael Jackson’s Heal the World responded more quickly and picked up almost five times as many pencils as people in the other group.
What should be done about dopey stuff like this? How about a kind of peer ridicule? An academic Hall of Infamy? I’ll bet it pops up again in one of those “numerous studies have shown…” stories.
Unmatched, though, is the paper by postmodern teacher of nursing Dave Holmes from 2006 concluding that evidenced based medicine is fascist because it excludes other ways of knowing. The paper is here and is worth reading right through. You might laugh or grind your teeth in anger.
