[sowhatquestion]

Was anyone else disturbed by Strack and Martin's hand-waving away the null replication result? Based on my (admittedly elementary) knowledge of statistics, it seems like 17 replication attempts (samples) whose means are distributed around zero constitute some pretty airtight empirical evidence that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling. How else to read Strack and Martin's complaints but as a kind of special pleading that there was something ineffable about the experiment that the replications missed? Some of their comments gesture in the direction of claiming that replication may be literally impossible.

I walked away from this article more convinced than ever that there are big problems with this field of research. And I don't "want" to believe it, either -- I loved Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Speaking of which, kudos to Kahneman himself for being (apparently) a more committed empiricist than the other psychologists discussed here.

[Balgair]

I was very concerned there, but for more than one reason.

He started out volunteering to replicate the study and also helping the researchers out a LOT with the experimental re-set-up. Then, when his research is found to be suspect, he starts to throw doubt on it.

Or at least that is what the news article author wrote. Both groups, the new author and the researchers, have incentive to recast what the results of the re-do say. One to sell ads, the other, it is implied, to keep tenure or something, I dunno.

Looking at the redo, there are many good reasons the original researchers have to continue to say their research may be 'good' still. Reasons that the rest of the field entertains and to some extent, believes.

Still, to your point that they may think it is impossible to replicate: That means that no real research occured in the first place. If they are seriously arguing, as the news author implicates, that a research team cannot ever replicate a study, they what they are doing is not 'science' or even psuedoscience. There then is NO POINT to doing any of the research in the first place. If you can't prove an effect, even with large errorbars or something, then you are wasting your life and the money of others.

[vidarh]

> that there's no inner emotional effect from smiling.

It likely means there's no inner emotional effect from just the specific measured physical activation of facial muscles.

Part of the problem here is, as they say, that we don't know why it failed to replicate. I saw Strack and Martin's complaints in part at least as finding that to be a concern:

Maybe there genuinely is no effect, or maybe the effect they originally measured is down to something subtle that was different due to all the changes in the experimental setup.

Personally I think that's a big flaw in the replication attempt: They ought to have at least included a couple of groups that followed the original setup as closely as humanly possible, to see whether that would give different results.

In any case, they were measuring something very specific: Whether forcing subjects to put their facial muscles into something resembling a smile while they are unaware of being made to smile will cause them to subsequently be more likely to judge a comic funny.

Can that can be extrapolated to the question of whether smiling will make you happier? Maybe. Maybe not.

Is it relevant to situations where people decide to smile with the intent of trying to force an emotional change? No idea.

Is it relevant to situations where people realise that they have been smiling without knowing why? No idea.

Is it relevant to situations where forcing a smile triggers social feedbacks that affect your emotions (e.g. people smiling back)? Probably not at all, but who knows.

It's very possible that the failure to replicate genuinely means the original result was flawed, without it actually telling us anything about typical real world situations that people wrongly interpreted the original paper to apply to.

This is perhaps a bigger problem: The original finding has been spun so much over the years into something it was not. They specifically tried to "engineer away" peoples knowledge about whether or not they were smiling or of someone trying to affect their emotional state. And that's fine for their original purpose, but it's not very relevant to most of the situations that people have subsequently tried to apply the spun version of the results to.

[galaxia2]

You are trying to intellectualize this too much. We simply tried an experiment. We smiled while we are feeling neutral or down. Voila! Emotion becomes positive after a while. Physiology affects psychology, and psychology affects emotions. Evidence is truth.

[Dylan16807]

If you expect that X will make you happy, and do X, most people will report being happier for a while. That's true no matter what X is. It could even be frowning, let's say "to use up the negative emotions" or whatever. That by itself is not evidence that X does anything.

[galaxia2]

I understand where you're coming from. It's a form of confirmation bias. But for me as long as it works for me I'm fine with it. Scientific results be damned. Science serves man, not the other way around.

[Dylan16807]

If you have something that works for you, great. But don't confuse that with the actual question the study is trying to ask, which is knowledge about how emotions work. The result doesn't tell you what to do, but it's irrelevant to what you do. Don't damn it, just leave it to the people that are interested in that question for other reasons.

[dkersten]

The placebo effect is a real thing that actually has benefits. In this particular case, even if smiling is purely placebo, all is well because a smile is free (of charge and of adverse side effects).

But in the case of many medicines, just because magic-miracle-pill-x "works for you" doesn't really mean its a good idea if it actually only works due to placebo: maybe its really expensive (for something that may as well be just sugar) or maybe there is actual medication that is much more effective or maybe its safety hasn't been fully studied as is the case with much alternative medicine.

In any case, Hitchens's razor applies:

    What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.