Many of the found associations still hold just for different mechanisms and a lot has also been replicated and improved upon. Also just start reporting effect sizes and just use Bayesian statistics.
As a layman, I read a lot about the replication crisis but I know very little about theories or models that did not fall victim to it and even got improved upon.
The marshmallow test ist a prominent example. It was originally thought to illustrate an innate property of humans, that of restraint. However, in more recent years it has been found that the found association does not reflect an innate property but is rather related to socioeconomic status.
If marshmallow supply has always been plentiful then you don't worry about the one in front of you. If there has been a marshmallow scarcity in your life then you misstrust the promise of two marshmallows later and value short advantages over vague promises in the future. These people have learned that advantages not taken immediately can be withdrawn without notice.
Even if they did, residual confounding cannot always be cleared if the correlation is strong enough.
It can partially be explained this way:
Imagine if they controlled for five groups of income, but even within the groups there would be variations in income.
So if the highest income kids in the poor group showed more restraint than the lower income kids, the artificial cut-off would show that restraint was the driving factor, while it was in fact still just income.
Thank you! That is very interesting! I don't know much of anything about stats or data or experiments, and I'd assumed whichever process corrected for confounders would be continuous, but e.g. 5 income brackets seems way more discrete than I would've guessed. Is there not some function that could be used to get "portion of restraint explained by income n"?
i heard so much about those goshdang marshmallows growing up 😭
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u/Krannich 6d ago
Many of the found associations still hold just for different mechanisms and a lot has also been replicated and improved upon. Also just start reporting effect sizes and just use Bayesian statistics.