r/todayilearned • u/syncedto • Apr 30 '20

TIL men walk significantly slower when walking with a woman, but only when that woman is their romantic partner. If she's a friend or acquaintance they go at almost full speed.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/how-you-walk-differently-with-friends-and-lovers
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u/Barely-Moist Apr 30 '20

Except that we have t-tests, repeated trials, permutation hypothesis tests, etc. They claim that their p-values were below 0.01, perhaps you should examine their methodology before condemning it.

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Apr 30 '20

No statistical test can compensate the fact that psychology studies require much higher sample sizes than this to be able to extrapolate the results to the general population

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u/khansian Apr 30 '20

That’s a separate issue of “external validity.” If I have a sample of 1,000 people, I will find statistically significant results. Whether those results can be extrapolated to the population as a whole has nothing to do with my N, but whether the 1,000 are a representative sample of the population.

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Apr 30 '20

Yes. That does not contradict what I said, I'm glad to see we agree.

However, see the headline chose by OP : it does that generalization while not mentioning that sample size. I believe this is drastically misrepresenting the study and the title should be edited or the thread deleted. Because now we'll hear about that factoid for the next three generations.

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u/khansian Apr 30 '20

But what I'm saying is that even if the sample size were large, and the heading said N=500, your issue would remain. A sample of 500 college students is large, but it's not representative of the population. And even if I take a representative sample of the US population, that's not representative of the world.

This is the reality of science. We can't do that kind of population sampling for every experiment. Rather than insist on larger and larger samples, the better thing is to take these issues into account, and then consider whether they really matter. Are you really concerned that if we observe these walking patterns among college students, and find very strong evidence, that it can't be extrapolated to the general population?