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Retraction action
On 25 February, there appeared one of the most spectacular retraction notices it has ever been Feedback’s pleasure to read. A retraction notice is when a scientific journal decides that a study it has published is so flawed and unreliable that it effectively unpublishes it.
The new retraction notice covered not one, not two, but five articles in Perceptual and Motor Skills, all by Nicolas Guéguen at the University of Southern Brittany in France.
The five studies were published between 2002 and 2009. To pick just one, in 2007 Guéguen was the sole author of a study entitled “Bust Size and Hitchhiking: A field study“. It purports to show, using real-world experiments, that women with larger breasts are more likely to be picked up when hitchhiking. Two years later, this time with a colleague, he found that blonde women were also more likely to be able to hitch a ride.
With results like that, it is no wonder Guéguen’s work became a popular subject for news stories. Alas, this does include New Scientist, which in 2008 covered a study (not yet retracted) claiming women were more receptive to chat-up lines when at their peak monthly fertility.
It took almost another decade for the house of cards to start shaking. In 2017, researchers Nick Brown (who blogs as “steamtraen”) and James Heathers began writing about Guéguen’s work. They found he was prolific, often publishing “10 or more sole-authored empirical articles per year… many of which include extensive fieldwork”. Immediately raising the question: how did he find time? They also became suspicious of the large effects claimed.
And then the house of cards started to crumble. In 2019, the International Review of Social Psychology added “expressions of concern” to six of Guéguen’s papers. In 2022, The Journal of Social Psychology retracted a study claiming that men perceived women as having stronger sexual intent if they were wearing red, noting that “table one in the manuscript had four combinations of means and standard deviations that were impossible given the reported sample sizes“. That same year, the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology slapped an expression of concern onto a study claiming that men were more likely to help a woman “when her hair fell naturally on her neck, shoulders and upper back“.
And now come the latest retractions. The notice explaining them is a doozy, albeit couched in academic language. It warns of “low confidence that the study designs were implemented as described” and that “much of the data in these articles are implausible or were incorrectly analyzed”. In other words: we don’t believe he did what he said, and in any event, he did it wrong.
The editors say Guéguen didn’t respond to their queries. Frankly, given the nature of his work, Feedback suspects his only reply would have been: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”
It seems only right to let Heathers have the last word: “Just remember that if you write unreliable, embarrassing, Benny-Hill-ass studies and someone finds out just how badly you did that… then you, too, could be pretty much OK for seven years or so before there are broader consequences.”
Botticelli xxx peacock
A few weeks ago, Feedback wrote about the vexatious Scunthorpe problem: the difficulty of blocking offensive words online, when the same letter strings are often found within completely innocuous words, such as the names of English towns. Three readers have managed to tell us, without falling foul of our email filters, about similar experiences.
Richard Black relates his time as a university technician in the early 2000s, when a student asked for help setting up a Hotmail email account. (Note for younger readers: Hotmail is an old name for Outlook, the email system your parents use at work because Microsoft has a stranglehold on the business software market.) Richard writes: “I tried all sorts of permutations of his name without success and we finally gave up and managed to set up a Yahoo account.” (Note for younger readers: Yahoo was… oh, actually, Yahoo is still around.) Anyway, the student’s surname was Peacock.
Around the same time, Richard Hind “was given a budget to implement an email filtering solution”. It worked pretty well, barring “some curious US slang terms that were deemed offensive”. But many “innocent emails” were also stopped. The only pattern was that they were sent by staffers to friends elsewhere. “Eventually it clicked,” says Richard. The blocked emails were all signed with three kisses, or Xs, “which the email filter interpreted as adult material”.
Spare a thought also for Patricia Finney, who wrote a blog about optimism in the face of climate change, and illustrated it with a reproduction of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Facebook rejected it for “nudity and nipples“. “I’m still waiting for the apology,” she says.
Sweet treats
Feedback’s reading pile is teetering like an experimental spaceship in a Thunderbirds episode, so we are reluctant to add to it. But a series of books by a food historian did catch our eye. A Dark History of Sugar is about the not-remotely-sweet colonial adventures underpinning the sugar industry. On a lighter note, The Philosophy of Puddings sounds delightful, and we were impressed by the title of Knead to Know: A history of baking. The author of all these calorific tomes? Neil Buttery.
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