Perhaps it’s the political nature of the study but everyone seems to be missing the basic flaw in the argument for publishing this reproduction, that the flaws of the original research ( small sample size, weak correlation, etc ) were published for everyone to see. We’re talking about a science journal here and the general mindset of the comments seems to be equating it with a magazine or something. Educated readers, the real audience of this journal, would’ve read the research ‘against the grain’, if you will, and immediately saw that there was little or nothing there. This begs the question of why publish in the first place, to which an answer might be that it was unique research at the time. The methods pass muster and the data is there to be scrutinized by the reader. These guys are basically taking advantage of the obvious and attempting to, as they say themselves, ‘make their careers’.
But “we” didn’t see the flaws. It has been a high impact study, and people both inside and outside of academia have been working off the assumption that it is true.
There’s no reason not to have seen the flaws ( chief among them the minuscule sample size particularly for such a broad conclusion ) if one read the study critically. This gets at a symptom of our culture’s lack of understanding of how research works. That’s why one of the most powerful marketing techniques today is to merely state: ‘reasearch shows xyz’ with only a footnote referring to the underlying studies that no one will read, and then those that do will do so with specific predjudice rather than general skepticism. Those who work under the assumption you mention are making the same mistake of reading the headline and taking it as knowledge, usually because it supports some bias of theirs or some point they’d like to make one way or the other, just like those who are unnerved by the journal not publishing the replication study.
