Matthew Yglesias » The Counterintuition Boom

Nov 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 am

The Counterintuition Boom

John Sides notes the skyrocketing occurrence of the phrase “counterintuitive findings” in political science literature:

The world sure is getting less interesting! And of course this does point to a potential problem with the scholarship — a “counterintuitive” finding is more interesting, and thus more likely to get published, than an intuitive one. But maybe lots of our intuitive ideas are correct and the “counterinuitive” selection bias is obscuring that. Certainly this is a problem in punditry and (especially) magazine writing, where the key to getting a lot of column inches is to have an interesting idea rather than a true one.

Comments
37

Filed under: Media, Political Science,

37 Responses to “The Counterintuition Boom”

Dan F. Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:57 am
Is that Y-axis correct? Cause 300 is not a very big number compared to the number of papers that get published every year.

Related point is that the scholarly literature as a whole has expanded over the past 50 years. You can take pretty much any key word (nanoparticles! ozone hole !) and get a very simiar curve.
Rob Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:58 am
Isn’t that like Slate’s motto? (Monkey fishing anyone?)
Nate Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:59 am
Or maybe the same phenomenon always existed, but the word “counter-intuitive” wasn’t used to describe it.
Sherman Dorn Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:05 am
Unlike the naysayers above, I think Matt’s right. One colleague of mine calls it the “Goldilocks Principle”: papers that are published in social-science journals can’t be the same as prior work (or they’re not “contributing new knowledge”), nor can they be incredibly wild and unconnected to the existing literature. Somewhere in the middle is just right…

My catchphrase is “plausible surprise”: the academic work that wins awards (or deserves to) often has an argument that sort of fits in with what you’ve known previously but brings a slight grin because of its cleverness or its way of working with the material.
AJ Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 am
Really? As Dan said, you need to control for the increase in scholarly journals and increased expectation in academic circles to publish.
Freddie Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 am
I’ve been complaining about this for years. It’s the Slate.com effect, although of course it stretches to a lot of different media. Editors prize contrarianism and faux-provocative arguments more than they prize work that is well-written or true.
paradox Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 am
It could be the phenomena of paradox is becoming more widely acknowledged. Possibly.
Mudge Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
So? Intuition sucks..always has. That’s why they invented science. Whether political science is an oxymoron is a continuing question. Intuition, of course, says that it is.
Victor Tremblay Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am
If the problem about intuitive ideas is that they’re boring, the solution should be to market them as counter-counter-intuitive.
JimboSlice Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 am
I don’t buy this study, as someone noted about the # of phrases per decade would have to be much higher than 100 or 200, the first rule of science or engineering is to make sure that you have the order of magnitude right, and this study clearly does not. Yet another reason why we don’t want philosphers and political “scientists” running this country!
Matt (not the famous one) Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 am
he key to getting a lot of column inches is to have an interesting idea rather than a true one.

I guess that would explain a lot of the clear nonsense you write about Russia!
practitioner Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:09 am
And of course this does point to a potential problem with the scholarship — a “counterintuitive” finding is more interesting, and thus more likely to get published, than an intuitive one.

This is actually backwards.

Political scientists have dozens of contradictory conjectures (”theories”) to explain any phenomenon. For any result, there exists some theory that predicts the opposite. Simply state “well-known theory x predicts y” at the beginning of your paper, and then your finding of “not y” is “counterintuitive,” even if there are half a dozen other well-known “theories” that predict “not y.” As a result, virtually any finding can be portrayed as counterintuitive.

The rise of “counterintuitive” simply shows that political scientists have become more clever about presenting research results that would have otherwise gone unpublished. Once upon a time, it was more difficult to publish results that were not surprising. Today, you can publish virtually anything and portray it as surprising in the context of some theoretical framework or another. This sort of strategic marketing has actually reduced the “novelty” bias in publication.
David Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:14 am
My hunch is that some of these “counter-intuitive” ideas are merely presented that way in order to make them interesting for a journal. In political science this is a lot easier because of the omnipresence of Thomas Friedman. All one has to do is make an argument that goes against one of Friedman’s conclusions, use him as a strawman, an emblem of conventional wisdom i.e. what is intuitive, and make a “counter-intuitive” argument.
bdbd Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:38 am
About a decade ago, Paul Krugman wrote about the difficulty of getting editors of middle brow journals and periodicals (and those who write for such journals) to give much space to old ideas in economics like Ricardo’s comparative advantage as an explanation for trade patterns, and instead preferring ideas more recently concocted, ones that “turn received wisdom (like ‘comparative advantage’) on its head.” Modern and seemingly “torn from today’s headlines” mumbo jumbo always seems to have a step up — a comparative advantage, if you like, for column inches.
Marshall Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
This has got to be far, far worse in the economics literature. Most of the quote unquote counterintuitive phenomena academics describe are wrong, but that is way less important than that the findings are Interesting! Bold! Counter-intuitive!
Anonymo Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 am
I would like to see this corrected by searching for mentions of the word “The”. I suspect you will see a high (R>0.75) correlation between the two, and that the author is full of warm gaseous vapors.
Hector Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Re: Intuition sucks..always has.

Er, compared to what? It’s hard to know how to evaluate that statement in a prescientific era, since intuition and deductive reasoning were pretty much the only tools we had before the invention of the modern experimental method. And the record of deductive reasoning in explaining the natural world was mixed, to say the least. Just look at Aristotle or Galen.

The fondness for counterintuitive findings is a problem in all disciplines. The hard sciences would have as many dumb “counterintuitive’ theories as political science, if it wasn’t that scientific theories can be tested against reality and rejected if they don’t work, whereas there’s no such mechanism in other fields.
bdbd Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I don’t know what “economics literature” marshall is referring to (the freakonomics stuff? that’s not really “the economics literature,” even though most of that popularized stuff comes from academic research results) — most economics articles are pretty fuddy duddy, with valuable insights taking the form of techniques and data treatments rather than conclusions or results (which tend to be consistent with priors).
John Sides Says:
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Matt, thanks for the link. If anyone is interested, I have a new graph here that addresses some of the critical comments above.
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The Counterintuition Boom

37 Responses to “The Counterintuition Boom”

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