Quote:
Originally Posted by snowgyre
I suspected the study was crap from the title alone, because mammalian emotions are hard enough to quantify, let alone presume that emotional states of reptiles are the same.
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Yup, this is what set off my BS detector, too.
Luckily in this case it is pretty easy to show the weak reasoning and bias of the journal article, and clickbaity inaccuracy of the magazine article. Sometimes it takes a whole lot of scientific knowledge (which I don't have) to uncover this stuff.
It is fair to say that in most cases a person ought to go to the original journal article to confirm the claims of a magazine or news article; even where there isn't some intentional hoodwinking going on, I don't think that most journalists can interpret scientific journal articles very well (no criticism there -- good journalists are crucial to a well-functioning society; I just think scientific research has gotten too rarified to simplify readily).