436
Study Says That People Who Like Loud Exhaust Are Psychotic
(www.caranddriver.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
436 points (90.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
9631 readers
180 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Eh, the study design seems sus. It seems she hypothesized that such people may be psychopathic and lead with a survey which confirmed as such. Survey design is super tricky for psychological research.
Moreover, the students responding to the survey are not the car owners proper, instead these students are car enthusiasts. The level of car modding or gear headedness of the responder is required to lend credence to the study results.
Could someone comment on the effect sizes observed in the study? I can’t look it up right now. But the above are just my initial impressions, so happy to be corrected
You're right to be sceptical. The paper is poorly written, and overstates many of the results they found. The correlations identified between the car score and the dark tetrad scores aren't really very high, the highest is 0.51! They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables.
Also worth noting that there were stronger correlations between the explanatory variables than for any of the explanatory variables with the response. They should have included interactions in their regression model to incorporate this, or even better tried a set of models and compared them with ANOVA or similar. As is it's impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good. It only explains 29% of the variance which... Well, it's a statistic which is better for comparing models, but it suggests quite clearly they most of the variance in the car score is not explained but the dark tetrad scores.
There's a smattering of evidence in here that there's some statistical link between the scores, but it's not been well explored or presented, and there are issues with the statistical approach. Based on some comments in the discussion section I'd agree with your suggestion that the author is simply trying to confirm their hypothesis.
What are you talking about? A correlation coefficient of .5 is in the ballpark of or bigger than the correlation between human height and weight. I wouldn't be surprised if the bottleneck isn't in the reliability of the measurement.
Unmodeled interactions here also would only be able to suppress the explained variance - adding them in could only increase the R-squared!
"They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables. "
Yes, when you wanna know if a variable predicts another, one thing you can do is that you compare how well a model with the predictor included fares compared to a model without the predictor. One way of doing that is by using an F-test.
In case your 101 course hasn't covered that yet: F-tests are also commonly used when performing an analysis of variance.
"As is it's impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good."
You say that after quoting explained variance, which is much more useful (could use confidence intervals.. but significance substitutes here a little) in this context for judging how good a model is in absolute terms than some model comparison would be (which could give relative goodness).
Your criticism amounts to "maybe they are understating the evidence".
Do you think the paper drew sensible conclusions, or do you just not like my arguments?
This is fair enough, my background is not in social research so to me 0.5 is a moderate correlation. Not sure what you mean by the 'bottleneck' here, are you suggesting that the correlations could be higher with a different survey?
Given that the explanatory variables are in some cases more strongly correlated with each other than the response, do you think the model without interactions is likely to be an appropriate way to analyse the relationship between the response and the explanatory variables? It doesn't at all make sense to me to do one single regression model and say "The F test says this is a good model, so the explanatory variables explain the response", especially with a relatively low R^2, and given the fact that there is evidence of multicollinearity presented alongside!
The paper presents the fact that they have done a regression model with a few good significances without any real analysis of if that model is good. We don't see if the relationships are linear, we don't see if the model assumptions are met. Just doing a regression is not enough, in my opinion.
There's no need to be rude. It's perfectly acceptable to disagree with me, but you could do it politely.
Yes, I'm well aware, although I'm not sure what your point is. They haven't done any analysis of variance.
My point is that they haven't made any effort to find a model that best fits the data, they have just taken all the available variables, smacked them into python or R or whatever, and written down the statistics it spits out. There's no consideration in the paper given to interpreting the statistics, or to confirming their validity.
From the study:
Not only was p-value for age clearly not significant, the confidence interval for the coefficient was [–.21, .17]..... This includes 0 ffs! There's no evidence here that there is greater endorsement of the car items in younger respondents. Why was age even included in the model in the first place, given that the correlation was near 0?
Like I said - there is some evidence here of an interaction, I'll concede that in context the correlation isn't bad for 2 of the dark tetrad items, Wild and Crafty, but the analysis they have used to present this information is not well thought out or presented. Personally I don't think that a linear regression model is even the right way to analyse the data they have, I especially don't think this regression model is a good way to analyse the data.
I'm only going to bother reading the first paragraph of your comment since you didn't read much either.
Their hypothesis before the experiment was that people who liked loud mufflers were NARCISSISTIC, not PSYCHOTIC. The results disproved their hypothesis and supported the new one.
To elaborate, they expected that these people liked attracting attention and having people looking at them, thinking about them. What they found was that this wasn't the motivation, and rather, these people wanted to hurt others. They knew what they were doing was unpleasant and undesired, and that is why they do it. It's very different than narcissists, who want to be liked and don't go out of their way to hurt people for their own enjoyment.
To me it seems like they’re saying “predicted” when they meant “hypothesized”.
Here are the questions they used:
I think what’s missing from the survey design are questions which explore intent, like “I would use a loud muffler when people are sleeping”. I also think the “makes me a person” and “really cool” wording is ambiguous because the answers are not necessarily related to one’s personality. For example “makes me a person” could refer to maybe “helps me achieve survival” to someone, and “really cool” could mean anything from deep interest hobby to expressing admiration of other people’s abilities.
The other issue is that their sample is only business students, so it’s not representative of the entire male population.
I think maybe they released this pilot to gather initial impressions, so it makes sense to be critical and make suggestions for improvements
Edit I think another issue is that people in general don’t understand the disposition of the loud muffler enthusiast, and the approach in this study is starting out with the assumption that the motivation is dark tetrad.