“Never take a study at face value…”
A big part of what we do at Vinyl Verified is correct journalists and media outlets when they run stories based on flawed scientific studies. If they would do their homework and ask these ten questions outlined in this article from Berkley’s Greater Good Magazine to determine a study’s credibility, we wouldn’t have to do it nearly as often.
“Summarizing scientific studies and applying them to people’s lives isn’t just difficult for the obvious reasons, like understanding and then explaining scientific jargon or methods to non-specialists. It’s also the case that context gets lost when we translate findings into stories, tips, and tools for a more meaningful life, especially when we push it all through the nuance-squashing machine of the Internet. Many people never read past the headlines, which intrinsically aim to overgeneralize and provoke interest. Because our articles can never be as comprehensive as the original studies, they almost always omit some crucial caveats, such as limitations acknowledged by the researchers. To get those, you need access to the studies themselves...” Continue Reading...