Nick Brown was a 50y/o CS/IT employee who wanted to cross-train to human resources and wanted "evidence-based stuff". He encountered lots of fantastic positive psychology claims that were being accepted wholesale as "quantitative". He traced the math behind a critical one back to a computational fluid dynamics paper, which the debunkees had used equations from with no context. (allegedly because of the use of "Flow" in positive psychology!)
He cold emailed professors asking for feedback, wrote a 3000 word critique, got help from a mathematician and psychologist in smoothing the writeup, and ultimately got it published in a top journal and the offending results recognized as flawed. The general crusade continues along with co-crusaders Sokal and Friedman.
The result in question was the legendary 3-1 positive to negative tipping point between flourishing individuals and languishing ones.
> It seemed a case of numbers fudging. In a valid fluid dynamics problem, the numbers plugged into the equation must correlate to the properties of the fluid being studied. But in attempting to draw an equivalence between the physical flow of liquids and the emotional “flow” of human beings, Losada had simply lifted the numbers that Lorenz used in 1963 to explain his method in the abstract, numbers used merely for illustrative purposes. Losada’s results, along with the pretty butterfly graphs Brown had been shown in class, were essentially meaningless.
Some make millions for Authors who take those papers and cite them in popular psych books. The actual authors of the papers are rarely, if ever, making millions.
I don't know whether it made millions, but Fredrickson did write a pop-psych book based on the critical positivity ratio: Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.
The 9 million dollars in grants that the author received probably were also completely wasted, since someone that would randomly apply CFD equations to people is unlikely to have published worthwhile research.
Remains to be tallied how many of her research assistants on those projects went on to have careers in the field... Careers which are now more or less tainted by the association.
Even harder to tally: How many of those deserve to be more tainted because they saw it for what it was but didn't speak up. (Yeah, I know, hard to do for a lowly assistant.)
Nick Brown was a 50y/o CS/IT employee who wanted to cross-train to human resources and wanted "evidence-based stuff". He encountered lots of fantastic positive psychology claims that were being accepted wholesale as "quantitative". He traced the math behind a critical one back to a computational fluid dynamics paper, which the debunkees had used equations from with no context. (allegedly because of the use of "Flow" in positive psychology!)
He cold emailed professors asking for feedback, wrote a 3000 word critique, got help from a mathematician and psychologist in smoothing the writeup, and ultimately got it published in a top journal and the offending results recognized as flawed. The general crusade continues along with co-crusaders Sokal and Friedman.
The result in question was the legendary 3-1 positive to negative tipping point between flourishing individuals and languishing ones.