[citizenpaul]

I stopped reading at

>They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents.

Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES.

I am more interested in reading about debunked studies rather than new ones, as you can tell I have a huge general assumption that they will be poorly performed.

I guess the one thing that was also left out from my comment was also that most of these experiments are carried out by college age undergrads that are rich (and still mostly white).

Yeah they are "overseen" by someone with a PHD.... who depends on getting as many papers as possible published. Which is another issue. As I said I obviously have some serious bias against the validity of most "social science"

[semanticjudo]

> Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game).

Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?

I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.

If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.

Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.

[citizenpaul]

>this finding would stand regardless of race.

That is probably correct. I wasn't specifically dunking on this study about the race component. Its just a huge issue with this field in general. Also(My take) the race doesn't have so much to do with it as the typical culture from what we classify as race but since culture type is not ever tracked anywhere "race" is all we have to go on. There by my take could be someone that is "black/asian/indian/whatever" but raised in "white" culture and would count from a psychology experiment standpoint as white.

Sorry I don't have them, too much cruft online to find them. Mostly as debunks to other experiments where when real stakes are used the experiment could not be replicated. You may be able to find them searching "replication crisis" as one of your keywords but I don't have time to dig them up right now. its just a fringe minor interest of mine.

On a side note: Have you ever participated in any of these? I have and I've seen participants actively undermine the spirit of the experiment while in the experiment, making side bets and such. Usually there is some sort of cap on what you can get 5-20$ or something and people there are basically saying the few bucks was just for beer money or whatever so they are willing to risk it to make a "Pot" out of the money and one person can have a nice day from it. Again since most of the people available for these experiments (despite what TV portrays) are not really hard up for the few bucks from the couple hours they spend participating. (based on my real world experiences)

Could that have been part of the experiments? Maybe. Maybe for some of them, but not all the ones I've seen for sure. And they used that data to "prove" something...