F* the Children and Get Off My Lane!

On September 08 2026 07:11 Xsnac1 wrote:
if only the single article you cite would not be bad science.

I have a problem with papers that put the psychological conclusion into the name of the measurement and then act as though they have demonstrated it. *No mercy for victims* (Ghavam et al., 2023). Participants perform a timed task: shoot armed figures, spare unarmed ones.

The authors subtract the armed-target shooting rate from the unarmed-target shooting rate and interpret the result as aggression toward innocent victims. But look at what this score actually does:

someone who shoots everybody and someone who shoots nobody get exactly the same score.

You can score “more aggressive” simply by missing more armed targets, without shooting one additional innocent person. How have we established a lack of mercy here? Where have we separated hostility from poor attention, difficulty distinguishing the objects, or unfamiliarity with the controls?

Then this questionable proxy becomes “general aggression,” and the discussion moves into explanations involving psychopathy, violent games, and dangerous driving.

All from a cross-sectional sample of people already in a court-ordered traffic rehabilitation program.

Add the confusion between regression coefficients and t-statistics, plus unexplained changes in reported sample size, and I am supposed to trust the strength of this interpretation? brooooo