I can't see how this is valid at all. We know that polls give biased results unless you are very careful with the sampling. Here people are self-selecting for a poll (eg via mechanical turk). Then you apply a highly contrived scenario that they are googling about a candidate. Then you ask them a bunch of questions, immediately, and proceed to draw wide ranging conclusions designed to increase your self-importance as much as possible. I mean, seriously, it's worse than useless.
This article is also written as if these findings are earth shattering. After conducting a small, biased, invalid study (Asking people in San Diego about an Australian election? How does that generalize to anything?) and finding a large effect Epstein says 'We did not immediately uncork the Champagne bottle'. Is that how psychology research is conducted? Researchers toasting large implausible effects in small biased samples that have no external validity?
I had to stop reading the article when it invited the reader to compare two loosely-related percentages as if they were the same measure:-
"We predicted that the opinions and voting preferences of 2 or 3 per cent of the people in the two bias groups ... would shift toward that candidate. What we actually found was astonishing. The proportion of people favouring the search engine’s top-ranked candidate increased by 48.4 per cent"
I can't see how this is valid at all. We know that polls give biased results unless you are very careful with the sampling. Here people are self-selecting for a poll (eg via mechanical turk). Then you apply a highly contrived scenario that they are googling about a candidate. Then you ask them a bunch of questions, immediately, and proceed to draw wide ranging conclusions designed to increase your self-importance as much as possible. I mean, seriously, it's worse than useless.
This article is also written as if these findings are earth shattering. After conducting a small, biased, invalid study (Asking people in San Diego about an Australian election? How does that generalize to anything?) and finding a large effect Epstein says 'We did not immediately uncork the Champagne bottle'. Is that how psychology research is conducted? Researchers toasting large implausible effects in small biased samples that have no external validity?
Flagged.