From power posing to sexy armpits: how we can learn from bad science and do better

Date: Monday 4th April 2022

Time: 7pm

Venue: Zoom https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/6342250593?pwd=RXF2UDFlamtlMUpsVHZvQWkzdlp2Zz09 

Meeting ID: 634 225 0593
Passcode: mahzoom

Speaker: Tristram Wyatt

The Power Posing TED talk has been viewed almost 50 million times but there's no real effect despite its attractive plausibility: the original experiments couldn't be replicated. Reproducibility failures have affected all parts of the life sciences. What is impressive is the way that psychologists have responded constructively and creatively to their own field’s very public ‘reproducibility crisis’. The solutions include new ways of doing experiments, such as Registered Reports and aspects of Open Science. I will use the story of the ‘putative human pheromones’ androstadienone and estratetraenol which, despite never having been shown to be pheromones, have been the subject of some 60 studies claiming ‘significant’ positive results. These are quite possibly false positives, part of the ‘reproducibility crisis', sadly common in the rest of the life and biomedical sciences, which has many instances of whole fields based on false positives.

Tristram did his PhD in animal behaviour in the Dept of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. Before going to Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education as a university lecturer (Associate Professor) in 1989, he was a university lecturer at the University of Leeds and held research fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wales, Cardiff. The second edition of his book “Pheromones and Animal Behavior” won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014. He is a senior research fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He is a visiting lecturer in the Division of Biosciences at University College London. Website: www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-tristram-wyatt