A Hoax in Psychology [Or Simply Bad "Scholarship"?] cited 350 times--like Melville Hoaxes [or Mere Sloppinesses?] I Exposed in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/the-magic-ratio-that-wasnt/33279?cid=a

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The Magic Ratio That Wasn’t

August 5, 2013, 5:00 am

By Tom Bartlett

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The 2009 book Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life, by Barbara Fredrickson, was praised by the heavyweights of psychology. Daniel Gilbert said it provided a “scientifically sound prescription for joy.” Daniel Goleman extolled its “surefire methods for transforming our lives.” Martin E.P. Seligman, often called the father of positive psychology, raved that “this book, like Barb, is the ‘real thing.’”
But the top-notchness of the research that underpins the book has been called into serious question. Even Fredrickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has now backed away from the ratio in the book’s subtitle, saying she didn’t really understand the mathematics behind it and had relied instead on the fact that it had been peer-reviewed.


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The paper has been cited 350 times, according to Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science database, and has been mentioned in prominent books, including Seligman’s Flourish, published last year. And it’s not hard to see why: The ratio appears to lend some quantitative rigor to a field sometimes criticized for its mushiness. Fredrickson and Losada had apparently stumbled on the magic number for human happiness.

Nick Brown

Then along came Nick Brown. Brown, a graduate student in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, read the paper as part of a course. It seemed like bunk to him. Brown is not a math genius; as an undergraduate he skipped math courses because they were too hard. Still, it immediately appeared to him as if the paper was making outlandish and completely unsupported claims. “I realized that Fredrickson and Losada’s approach was always going to come up with the same number, like a stopped clock, because in that equation there is no connection between the data and the math,” he recalls. So he set about attempting to see whether the numbers added up. He found that they did not.
Next he sent an e-mail to Alan Sokal—he of the infamous 1990s hoax in Social Text—a professor of physics at New York University and a man who enjoys poking the softer sciences in their softest spots, to see if he was intrigued. Of course he was. Brown, Sokal, and Harris Friedman, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, put together a paper, published in July in American Psychologist, dissecting the 2005 paper by Fredrickson and Losada. They concluded that it had been “based on a series of erroneous and, for the most part, completely illusory ‘applications’ of mathematics.” They titled their takedown “The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking.” The paper doesn’t just assert that errors were made, though it does assert that. It argues that the authors concocted a transparently ridiculous fiction.

HERE I BREAK FOR MY OWN COMMENTS:

Neal L. Tolchin's MOURNING, GENDER, AND CREATIVITY IN THE ART OF HERMAN MELVILLE based a chapter on a grotesque mistranscription of a letter by Melville's mother about TYPEE. This is what I said in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE:

The first readers, you think, would have done a little spot verifying of Tolchin's transcriptions and then would have hooted the book out of libraries? That did not happen. No one at Yale University Press (Yale, just as Feidelson was retiring from the English department), no reader for the press, no reviewer or critic (conspicuously not Andrew Delbanco) checked any of Tolchin's transcriptions from manuscripts. It did not matter at all that Tolchin had built a whole chapter on a fantastic misreading of Maria Melville's handwriting, and that, of course, according to the theory of organic unity he had to argue that the falsely-conceived chapter was built into and affected the entire book.

               I called the mistranscription in Maria Melville’s February 28, 1846 letter to the attention of Brian Higgins so he could mention it in the annual American Literary Scholarship, but apparently no one has taken that warning to heart. Tolchin's book has been cited favorably dozens of times. In the American Historical Review (April 1990) Karen Halttunen declared that "Tolchin convincingly demonstrates that Melville's work abounds with images of blocked bereavement and with thinly veiled references to the death of his father." Furthermore, Tolchin "offers a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work." Bryan Collier Short in Cast By Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development (1992) lists it among "biographically oriented studies" and Karen Elizabeth Smythe in Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (1992) cites it as "a biographical study." Julia A. Stern, in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997), offers this praise:

Much of my thinking about the relationship between the feeling that characterizes sentimentality and the pathological disturbance of mourning that takes shape in melancholia is inspired by Mitchell R. Breitwieser's remark that, in a recent work on Melville and mourning in antebellum America, Neal L. Tolchin has identified the centrality of a blocking and channeling of mourning in genteel culture, and the consequent production of an underground melancholia. Tolchin's extensive and perspicacious investigation of Melville's America suggests to me that sentimentalism is a reappearance of the Puritan sublimation of mourning . . . ." (241)

It is "an important study," says Peter Balaam in Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Composition, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature (2009). As dozens of favorable citations show, Tolchin's book has entered into common knowledge among writers interested in histories of emotion, in grief, misery, gender, death, and even the making of the middle-class family. Not one of the critics who have praised its insights and have incorporated its findings has seen that the second chapter is built upon a grotesque error which taints many other passages and the design of the whole the book. A critic who takes this flawed book as “substantial,” as "a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work" is deluded, and insofar as the critic incorporates Tolchin's findings into his or her own work, that work is tainted.

THERE IS NO UNDOING THE DAMAGE, FOR SINCE I WROTE OTHERS HAVE PROBABLY CITED TOLCHIN FAVORABLY. WHO BELIEVES FOR A MOMENT THAT BARBARA FREDERICKSON WILL NOT CONTINUE TO BE CITED FAR BEYOND THE PRESENT 350 TIMES?