Anyone with a lot of experience in social psychology lit?

[sciatrix]

This book I'm reading is giving me a lot of interesting thoughts, but I've also seen a lot of yelling about the replicability of social psychology results (like the marshmallow experiment) in the years since I've finished my bachelor's. Since I've more or less ignored the human psych literature except as it relates to my field, I'm a little bit at a loss when it comes to evaluating that research as a whole.

How much of the irreproducibility discussion undermines this body of work? How much smoke is there in that fire? Anyone know?

Comments

[staranise]

I'm not sure anybody actually knows what's signal and what's noise. I'm interested in what you're reading, partly because I know better how to evaluate something when I know what it is.

[sciatrix]

Right, so this book is Secrets From the Eating Lab, Traci Mann. It's largely about motivation-to-eat kinds of stuff, and how to make healthy choices but also that losing significant weight is basically impossible etc etc etc. Most of that I know pretty well how to assess, but I know that she cites the marshmallow stuff in a couple of places and there's a lot here about distraction and eating quantity/choices. There's a piece

One of the big things making me go "hmmmm" is her work on food labels and their influence on food choices, which I know there was a recent scandal about re: actively fudging data and deliberately p-hacking with no plausible deniability in, but am not sure if her lab was involved or she knows people who are. (Upon a quick google, I'm thinking here of Brian Wansink's group; haven't looked into Mann's background to see if she's ever worked with Wansink.)

On the other hand, the book is sparking a lot of thoughts I've been having about food-seeking motivation and stress, especially long-term and unpredictable stress, and about interactions between leptin and cortisol maybe integrating internal and external cues about what's going on as an organism tries to respond. There's a particular study involving telling people that a milkshake is either a diet "healthy" milkshake or a full-fat "tasty" one shaping the level of ghrelin released in respose to that milkshake that I want to track down, and also some discussions of how people eat when stressed--she first argues that most people eat more when stressed but then discusses astronauts eating less, typically, and I've been thinking along the lines of different responses to food and stress based on different modes of comfort seeking in different people, and also whether or not food itself has become imbued with stress in some people.

And then she went into a discussion debunking the entire concept of comfort food, and now I'm just thinking about how mood, stress, and hunger interact with one another in an organismal context.