#science reporting

Okay so here's the story. Way back in ye olde 2014 I was commissioned by The Sweethome (now Wirecutter) to review tampons. As part of my research for that review, I stumbled across some really fascinating old research on vaginal shapes. I wrote about that research for a group blog I used to be a part of, and about the weird little obsession I developed with some long lost research.

All I could really dig up was a set of studies done in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s by a woman named Paula Pendergrass. Pendergrass published a handful of studies about the shape of the vagina, which she measured by doing plaster casts of willing women. And what she described in her work was actually a set of different vagina shapes: the conical, the parallel sides, the heart, the pumpkin seed, and the least fortunately named slug.

But the thing that surprised me most was that after this one small set of studies by Pendergrass, that's it. There was nothing more. And it's not like Pendergrass had answered the question definitively, her work is full of ideas for how to better measure these shapes, and suggestions to collect more data. Why wasn't there anything else here? Why hadn't she continued this work? Why hadn't anybody asked more questions? I needed to know! So I managed to track her down and cold call her house in Arkansas (because journalists like me have no shame) to ask her why she stopped measuring vagina shapes.

Here's what I learned:

There’s no market for this data. Companies that manufacture vaginal products are looking only to confirm that things like tampons fit inside. They don’t care much about the specifics beyond that. But the big reason she highlighted was the one that made me both sad and angry. When she was doing the work, people were grossed out by it. “It’s off-putting to a lot of people, and I’ve had trouble with it since I started,” she said. “People who were embarrassed I was doing this, They said I was a a dirty old woman doing this.” A dirty old woman. For wanting to know the shape and size of the human vagina.

I wanted to chase this story further, but I could never sell it. In part because it's unclear if it matters clinically what the shape of someone's vaginal canal is. And yet... it's just so... INTERESTING!

But I let it go, after that blog post. (Well, that's not entirely true, I actually ordered a dental casting kit and had plans to cast my own vaginal canal using her study's instructions. But I never got around to it.)

FLASH FORWARD TO TODAY. And I get an email from a friend named Perrin Ireland who is apparently helping someone with a book about vaginas. Did I know that my blog was cited in a scientific journal, she asked? No! I DID NOT!!!

But here it is! Gender Bias in the Study of Genital Evolution: Females Continue to Receive Less Attention than Males, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 62, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 533–541. The author, Dara Orbach, writes:

When Pendergrass et al. (1996) demonstrated that human females have differently shaped vaginas, their findings were “offputting”, Pendergrass reported being called “a dirty old woman”, and gynecologists did not recognize the value of the research (Evelith, 2016). While a national research center exists in theUnited States ofAmerica for most major organ systems (e.g., National Eye Institute), female reproductive anatomy is categorized under the umbrella of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The research environment and social taboos have historically and still continue to hinder scientific inquiry in the field of female genital evolution.

Is my name spelled incorrectly? Yes! Do I care? No!

But truly it's nice to know that even though I couldn't chase this story and really report it out fully, it seems to have made some dent on at least one person who is asking questions about why we don't know more about the internal anatomy of people with vaginas.

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management.

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing “replication crisis” in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don’t hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.  

“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’”

Their possible answer is that review teams of academic journals face a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.

The link between interesting findings and nonreplicable research also can explain why it is cited at a much higher rate—the authors found that papers that successfully replicate are cited 153 times less than those that failed.

“Interesting or appealing findings are also covered more by media or shared on platforms like Twitter, generating a lot of attention, but that does not make them true,” Gneezy said.

…

With the findings from these three replication projects, the authors used Google Scholar to test whether papers that failed to replicate are cited significantly more often than those that were successfully replicated, both before and after the replication projects were published. The largest gap was in papers published in Nature/Science: non-replicable papers were cited 300 times more than replicable ones.

…

They also show the impact of such citations grows over time. Yearly citation counts reveal a pronounced gap between papers that replicated and those that did not. On average, papers that failed to replicate are cited 16 times more per year. This gap remains even after the replication project is published.

The study this is based on, from what I can access, is interesting, but the reporting in the press is dangerous. I mean, the press can't report science at the best of times but this really is dangerous nonsense.

sounds like pop psychology! googling the article title brought up the source:

sure, CuriousMindMagazine, seems legit.

at first brush, the article is a somewhat incomprehensible mix of quotes from the author of the study on which it is based, plus platitudes about friendship and certainties about what this study claims:

If you have a friend you love, but at times can’t stand because their harsh (though true) words can hurt like needles – you can’t help but think that they are just being mean. However, science says this is not the case when it comes to your closest friends.

In fact, recent findings have shown that your meanest friend is the one who truly loves you and wants the best for you.

According to a research published in Psychological Science, people who tend to make others experience negative emotions believe that the impact of those emotions will be beneficial for them in the long run.

The research was conducted at the University of Plymouth and it included 140 adult participants. The scientists behind the study observed their behavior during hypothetical situations: for instance, by generating the fear of failure to a friend who instead of learning for exams – is procrastinating his studying.

...

The findings of the study confirmed what scientists believed – that people indeed may be “cruel to be kind”.

...

In other words, people can sometimes be “mean” to you not because they hate you, or they want to hurt you – but because they care for you and their “meanness” comes out of selflessness and empathy. 

(emphasis in original)

big appresh for a study confirming that something may be true.

anyway, this article referenced that the study was published in Psychological Science and included a link which led here:

so although CuriousMindMagazine mentions Psychological Science, it directs the reader to ScienceDaily, which is admittedly a pretty legit source for lay summaries of scientific articles. also, unlike many academic articles, SD is freely accessible.

anyway, already in the headline and summary, there’s more caution and fewer absolutes about what this study confirms.

other misrepresentations and slippages begin to creep in between the SD and CMM articles. in the CMM article, for instance, there’s no reference to what the study actually consisted of except that “scientists behind the study observed their behavior during hypothetical situations: for instance, by generating the fear of failure to a friend who instead of learning for exams – is procrastinating his studying.”

on other hand, the SD article actually explains the study’s methods:

participants were assigned to be player A or B (in reality, all participants were assigned the role of B)

“A” anonymously delivered B a note about a recent breakup

participants were secretly divided into two groups and half played a video game with the goal of killing as many enemies as they could while others played one with the goal of escaping a scenario alive.

participants then listened to and selected music and game descriptions for “player A” to listen to in order to do well at the game they just played. in doing so, they had the ability to choose anger- or fear-inducing stimuli for “player A”, and their responses varied based on what the goal of the video game they had played was (so people playing the killing game chose angrier music while people playing the survival game chose scarier music)

(even writing that, i feel like i’m not doing the experimental design or results justice)

all of that in the CMM article about the researchers using fear of failure on an exam as a motivator? that came from a quote from the lead researcher:

“We identified several everyday examples where this [circumstances under which people would try to worsen others' mood for altruistic reasons] might be the case -- for instance, inducing fear of failure in a loved one who is procrastinating instead of studying for an exam,” López-Pérez says.

and this article, at last, links us back to the original PS study:

(the article is available to read here)

so, finally at the source. does the abstract actually claim that “your meanest friend is the one who truly loves you and wants the best for you“?

When aiming to improve another person’s long-term well-being, people may choose to induce a negative emotion in that person in the short term. We labeled this form of agent-target interpersonal emotion regulation altruistic affect worsening and hypothesized that it may happen when three conditions are met: (a) The agent experiences empathic concern for the target of the affect-worsening process, (b) the negative emotion to be induced helps the target achieve a goal (e.g., anger for confrontation or fear for avoidance), and (c) there is no benefit for the agent.

it does not.

but then, back in the comments on the facebook Meme page, you have people arguing the following:

No. There's playfully teasing your friends and then there's the people who take things too far and treat their "friends" like shit to make themselves feel better about themselves because they want and like to feel "above" others. Sorry science, but you lose this one.

which is very much not what the original research was about at all.

Like, I always hated that bullshit, but I ended up the most fed the fuck up with it after a person I used to trust, but now trust a whole fucking lot less:

Said that he voted for Drumpf because Hillary was pro-choice and he thought abortion was “unnatural,” taking a life into one’s own hands like murder.

That Drumpf’s comments to Billy Bush didn’t bother him because he thought women were naturally submissive and thus wanted to be “grabbed by the p***y” (Tho, he tried to justify it by saying that submission meant consent and he was “worried” abut that part, but I call bullshit)

Said that he thought transgender women could clal themselves women all they wanted but they weren’t “really” women because “you can’t argue with biology.”

The reason for his whole issues with activists and SJ-ers is because “We’re still the same cavemen at heart, changing ourselves and denying that would make us less human/like robots” (He technically used the word “cyborg society” to describe it, but fucking still)

And, I think to myself, this is the sort of mindset produced by uncritical parroting by the media of evolutionary/neurological/biological/”Scientific” justifications for the way things are regarding gender in society rather than sociological justifications*.

Thusly, we need to start calling out that sort of bullshit, answer it with a “This is why you’re wrong and furthermore fuck you...”

FREE until January 31st, on Amazon Kindle!

The news no longer breaks when events happen. It breaks after their consequences are already in motion.

The Science of First examines what happens when the delay between an event and our awareness of it collapses, and how that shift is quietly reshaping journalism, markets, public policy, and everyday decision-making. Drawing from reporting, data science, and real-world case studies, Francesco Marconi argues that power in the modern information environment is no longer defined by access or volume, but by time.