The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis
Here are three versions of the same story:
1. In the fall of 1996, Sally Clark, an English solicitor in Manchester, gave birth to an apparently healthy baby boy who died suddenly when he was 11 weeks old. She was still recovering from the traumatic incident when she had another baby boy the following year. Tragically, he also died, eight weeks after being born. The causes of the two children’s deaths were not readily apparent, but the police suspected they were no coincidence. Clark was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. The pediatrician Roy Meadow, inventor of the term “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” testified at the trial that it was extremely unlikely that two children from an affluent family like the Clarks would die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or “cot death.” He estimated the odds were 1 in 73 million, which he colorfully compared to an 80:1 longshot winning the Grand National horse race four years in a row. Clark was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The press reviled her as a child murderer.
2. Suppose an otherwise healthy woman in her forties notices a suspicious lump in her breast and goes in for a mammogram. The report comes back that the lump is malignant. She wants to know the chance of the diagnosis being wrong. Her doctor answers that, as diagnostic tools go, these scans are very accurate. Such a scan would find nearly 100 percent of true cancers and would only misidentify a benign lump as cancer about 5 percent of the time. Therefore, the probability of this being a false positive is very low, about 1 in 20.
3. In 2012, Professor Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia claimed to have evidence that looking at an image of Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker” could make people less religious. In a trial of 57 college students, he randomly assigned participants to either view “The Thinker” or a control image, Myron’s Discobolus, a sculpture of a Greek athlete throwing a discus, and then rate their belief
