[Itaxpica]

I'd take this with... not quite a grain of salt, but maybe a small dose of healthy skepticism. Simon Baron-Cohen is a legitimate and respected researcher, but he's well known in autism research circles as pushing very hard a theory that autism is a manifestation of an "extreme male brain", which is a theory that almost every other significant researcher in the field disagrees with. I'd suggest taking a critical view of any research coming out of his lab that bolsters his pet theory, like this does - there's a lot of context here that's lacking.

[dooglius]

It sounds like this is evidence for that view then. Why is the researcher's theory relevant to results that support that theory?

[Latty]

The scientific method is not generally served well by people seeking to find a particular answer, as opposed to the truth.

Not saying that is the case here, but I agree with the parent-it inspires some scepticism from me.

[dooglius]

You gererate a hypothesis and then experimentally test that hypothesis, I don't see anything wrong there. How else would you evaluate new theories that go against convention? Maybe you are suggesting that he fudged the data or otherwise manipulated the experiment to get a desired result?

[Latty]

Of course, but there is a difference between having a hypothesis to test, and believing something and setting out to find evidence for it. Those are some extreme examples of that being an issue, but also things like not publishing negative results can also be a result, less obviously.

I very specifically said that I was not saying that was what happened in this case, just that I agreed that there was something of a red flag.

[lazyasciiart]

One way that you can get bad results is to start with too broad a hypothesis, like 'autism is related to maleness', conduct your experiment and then engage in p-hacking, or analysing all the relationships in the data that would support your hypothesis until you find one that looks significant. [https://bitesizebio.com/31497/guilty-p-hacking/]