Ethics

The Voodoo They No Longer Call Voodoo

By Adam Kolber

An important and controversial neuroscience paper, formerly titled "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," has been posted here under its new name "Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition."  You can find discussion of the paper and the reason the name was changed here in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  A sample from the Chronicle article:

One of the most-debated psychology papers of the last few years is finally about to enjoy its official print publication ? but without the provocative title that helped spark the debate in the first place.

. . .

The paper argues that many recent studies in social neuroscience ? and, by implication, in several other types of neuroscience ? suffer from a severe statistical flaw.

At issue are the brain-imaging studies that appear in the newspaper almost every day: studies that attempt to find correlations between, say, jealousy or gambling and specific regions of the brain. To oversimplify, the ?Voodoo? paper argues that most such studies report spuriously high correlations because neuroscientists don?t adequately guard against the possibility that the brain patterns they see are simply random.

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).