Looking for Mr. Effect: Should you add more people to the equation or should you throw a load out?

What to do when you can’t find that elusive significant effect…

‘ I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process’ (Thomas Edison)

By not finding a significant effect, it doesn’t mean that you have just conducted a useless piece of research. It also doesn’t mean failure either.  As the quote from Edison states above, he never failed by not finding what he was looking for. The 2000 times before he eventually “succeeded” were merely stepping stones ruling out other possible answers; this is the scientific process. So, I don’t think that purposefully manipulating your data or adding participants to gain a significant effect is within the scientific-process, however I can understand how tempting it can be, especially when finding ‘nothing’ is quite boring.

In psychology, the significant effect is sometimes the sole reason why a piece of research is conducted in the first place. Unless, it is already in a well-researched area, many people do not usually conduct a study to purposefully not find any effect at all. This may explain why after spending alot of time carrying out your research, it can become ever so easy to manipulate your data by just taking out the outliers and taking what should be in your discretion- a bit too far. One outlier becomes two, then two outliers become nine and then suddenly you have reduced your sample of 300 odd students to about 30 who conform to what you think is “doing the experiment right”. Although I think that data should be manipulated, this should only be done when it is clear that the participant has failed to follow instructions or it is clear that measurement error has occurred; this can then prevent people from purposefully manipulating their data with the sole intent of finding a significant effect.

Also, when you don’t find a significant effect, it can also be very easy to re-run the experiment with more participants. This is where it can become very easy to gain a significant effect as re-running your study with more participants can appear to others as you just replicating your study to make your results more generalisable. However, there is a difference between re-running your study and replicating your study. Re-running your study with the sole intent of finding a significant effect is unscientific and… a bit pointless. If you didn’t find a significant effect  in the first place, it is highly unlikely that you will find an effect with more people. Sometimes, you are more likely to find an effect when the sample is small; This was reported in the Journal ‘Nature’ . Cambien et al (1992) found that a specific variant of a gene increased the likelihood of an individual having a heart-attack. Although the sample appeared quite large at the time (500 participants), this was nothing compared to the numerous replications that occurred after the study was published which equated to around 5000 participants; these studies did not find an effect at all. This reflects that adding more participants does not always increase your significant effect.

So what should you do if you don’t find Mr.Effect?
Nothing.
(Unless you had a ridiculously small sample of 13 people, and then you got a bit happy when it came to removing outliers, leaving you with a sample of 2)
It is perfectly reasonable, scientific and ethical to remove outliers but only with the sole intent of ridding the sample of “bad, inconsistent” data, not data that doesn’t conform to what you want it to do. You should never remove data with the sole intent of finding an effect; this is will possibly lead to a type 1 error and is also illogical, unscientific and unethical.

Instead of manipulating your data to find an effect, you should re-run your study and instead manipulate your Independent Variable in a different way; this will improve science as a whole, is a part of the scientific process and will allow science to evolve. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing that you haven’t found what you were looking for. In science, some of the most useful inventions and theories have been discovered by accident; Such as Penicillin, Plastic and the colour Mauve.
Also, you should never add more participants to your data with the sole intent of finding Mr. Effect, adding more participants is only logical when you have found an effect and you are replicating the study to be more generalisable. Adding participants, for the sole intent of finding an effect is a bit pointless as you are unlikely to find an effect anyway.Overall, I don’t think you should add more participants or manipulate your data to find Mr. Effect as, as I have argued above,  it is unscientific.

🙂

Cambien, F.,  Poirier, O., Lecerf, L., Evans, A., Cambou, J., Arveiler, D., Luc, G., Bard, J., Bara, L.,  Ricard, S., Tiret,L., Amouyel, P., Alhenc-Gelas^, F., & Soubrier, F., (1992) Deletion polymorphism in the gene for angiotensin-converting enzyme is a potent risk factor for myocardial infarction. Nature. 641-644

Week 8 comments for Alex :)

Hello,
Here are the comments I would like marked 🙂

1) http://psuc0f.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/sing-your-way-through-exams/

2)http://terrycurtis.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/sausages/

3) http://psychrno.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/can-correlation-show-causality-or-misconception/

4) http://chocolateraisons.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/can-correlation-show-causality/

Thankyou,
🙂

The Psychology of Creativity…How to be creative

What is creativity?

“Creativity is just connecting things” [Steve Jobs]

whereas Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that creativity is the phenomena that occurs when “rare individuals…  make a significant contribution” to society.

Is creativity really that rare?

Creativity can be easily perceived as an elitist, god-given, sometimes intimidating concept, which separates us mere mortals from the greats such as Picasso.
It was said, that you were either born with creativity or not and there wasn’t much you could do about it.
For many years, scientists had believed that being creative, or having the imagination to transform novel objects into everyday, practical inventions was something you were born with and could not be taught. The likes of Picasso or Steve Jobs had this almost supernatural power that everybody else could never access.

However, this view of the ‘creative-type- is all in the past, researchers today have found that creativity does not exist and instead creativity can be taught and be improved upon, in this sense it is not the rare phenomena that it was once assumed to be. Furthermore, family studies and twin studies have found that creativity is not passed through genetic inheritance and is instead reliant on the ways our brains develop, the diverse information we are surrounded by and whether we are in an environment that allows us to engage different areas of our brain simultaneously.
Research has found that there are many factors that can improve creativity and this all gives support to the view that creativity must not exist in the way that we think of it existing.
It can’t just be an ‘out-of-the-box’ idea, it must be something else.

So how can you make yourself creative?

1) Watch something funny

The first of the ways to improve creativity is through humour. Beeman and Kounios (2009) found that participants that were exposed to a humorous  30 second clip before completing a word association puzzle had more accurate and faster results than those that were shown a boring clip prior to the puzzle. This has been said to be due to positive moods allowing the brain to narrow the attention span which allows it to engage different parts of the brain.

2) Get Drunk

Alcohol has been argued to be another way to improve creativity. Researchers at the University of Chicago had found that intoxicated students performed 30%  better on insight puzzles than sober students. This has been argued to be due to a lack of focus and care for “quality-control” in the answers participants gave that promoted creativity in their responses.

3) Relax

Further research found that individuals that were forced to concentrate and be alert by drinking coffee were more likely to do worse in insight puzzles than those individuals that were not told to drink caffeine. Researchers have argued that relaxation allows us to turn the attentional-spotlight for information inward and allow our random associations to finally reach the more ‘creative’ right-hemisphere instead of forcing ourselves to think logically with our left-hemisphere.

4) Stare at the colour Blue

Research has found that participants solved twice as many puzzles when the colour of the background was blue. This has been said to be due to the colour Blue being associated with relaxation whereas participants did worse when the puzzle was surrounded by red as this is associated with alertness which does not help creative thinking.

5) Stay awake until a stupid time

Research has found that participants that were usually ‘night-owls’ (i.e. did their best work during the late evening) who were forced to stay up all night and then complete a puzzle in the early hours were more likely to do better at this time when they felt groggy,  than when they performed the task at a time when they felt they could usually do their best (e.g. in the evening).

Being tired and groggy=creative

6) Daydream

Research at the University of California found that individuals that day-dream are more likely to perform better on tests of creativity.

7) Think like a child

Participants that were told to think like 7-year olds were more likely to score higher on tests of divergent thinking (e.g. think of alternative uses for a car-tyre)

8) Go Travelling

Research has found that participants who lived abroad, took part in exchange programs or travelled during their summers were more likely to solve insight puzzles. This has been said to be due to the fact that they have been exposed to more diverse thinking and open-mindedness to new ideas which further increased their diverse thinking.

Overall, creativity is not that rare phenomena that you are either blessed with or not. It is the ability to organise incoming information and administer stored information that is appropriate for that moment in time. As seen above, this can be taught and you can even improve your creativity through random factors such as laughing and the colour blue.
This brings about questions about whether we can teach creativity in schools and workplaces to make the most of our creative outlets. However, if it is possible to teach creativity to ourselves, then it is also possible to teach creativity to a computer program. This is what researchers believe they can do here. If this is really possible, does this really put an end to the argument that creativity is not as rare as it seems as it can be so easily taught? If it is so easy, then you never know , all the greats such as  Picasso were probably really drunk, staring at the colour blue, thinking like a 7 year-old whilst laughing at something .
However there are many more questions to ask  if creativity isn’t so rare.
Such as if it isn’t rare, then why are there not many ‘creative-types’ around? Is this because there are different types of creativity? And does the ‘flash-bulb’ moment really does exist when you get an idea?

Finally (for those of you who still are reading this very long post), here is a short video of Friends to instill even more creativity in you,

🙂

Beeman, M., & Kounios, J. (2009) The Aha! Moment; the cognitive neuroscience of insight. Current Directions in Psychological Science