Science Fictions

We are sorry we’ve been missing so many episodes recently! Stuart’s been busy and Tom’s been… also busy. We’re busy. Hopefully back to normal service next week.
In the meantime, here’s an old paid episode, unpaywalled. Apologies.
…
Johann Hari is a journalist with an interesting past who has now written four very popular books on scientific topics (addiction, depression, attention, and obesity). Are those books any good?
In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart—who have both written reviews of Hari’s books—discuss Hari’s career, his sudden emergence as a science writer, and exactly how many miles you need to travel around the world to ensure your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.
Show Notes
* The funniest bad book review ever, of The Meaning of Disgust by Colin McGinn (review by Nina Strohminger)
* Hari’s corrections page for his new book where he discusses the Jay Rayner debacle
* Article about Hari’s quotations of Antonio Negri
* Brian Whelan’s criticism of Hari from 2011
* And another article by the same author on the same topic
* Guy Walters on Hari in the New Statesman
* David Allen Green on Hari and the allegations of sockpuppeting and Wikipedia editing
* Hari’s “personal apology” from 2011 where he admits to the Wikipedia editing and some of the sloppiness with quotes
* Telegraph blog on Hari and the translation in his article on the Central African Republic (Hari denies making up the quote)
* Amazon pages for Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, Stolen Focus, and Magic Pill
* Jeremy Duns on quotations in Chasing the Scream
* Dean Burnett’s viral criticism of Lost Connections
* Stuart’s tweets from 2018 where he attempts to find the source of Hari’s depression-relapse numbers
* Stuart’s Unherd review of Stolen Focus
* Collection of Matthew Sweet’s criticisms of the studies behind Stolen Focus
* Even more tweets from Matthew Sweet
* Stuart’s tweet on the “average American worker” study cited by Hari
* Tom’s Guardian review of Magic Pill
* Study of body image distortions in 100 people… done in 1987
* 2018 study of whether a parenting intervention reduces child BMI
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

We made it: triple figures! And as luck would have it, Nature just simultaneously published four major meta-science papers that are right up our street. Aw. Thanks, Nature. You shouldn’t have.
How screwed is social/behavioural science? We read all four papers to find out.
We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s been listening for all this time. See you for the next hundred!
Show notes
* The four Nature papers:
* Replication
* Reproducibility
* Robustness
* The non-DARPA one
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast—all 100+ episodes of it!—is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s another one for the annals of “entire scientific field becomes totally misguided for decades”. How could it have been possible that so many scientists fell for the idea of candidate genes—that there were individual gene variants that explained huge chunks of variation in depression, aggression, intelligence, and many more psychological traits? How could they have written literally hundreds of peer-reviewed papers based on completely false “results”?
Well, they did. Here’s the story.
(Why 99.5? We’re putting off doing Episode 100, just so we can mark the occasion with an even better topic).
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, the journal of underrated ideas for making the world a better place. Today we talked about the new article on why Japan’s railways are so good and what other countries can learn from them. Read all their articles, for absolutely zero cost, at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* The first study on 5HTTLPR and depression, from 1996
* Caspi et al.’s seminal 2003 Science paper on gene-environment interaction with 5HTTLPR and depression
* “Orchid genes” in The Atlantic; Wired; The New York Times
* Caspi et al’s 2002 paper on MAOA, the “warrior gene”
* Article on the Maori people and MAOA
* 2009 story on an Italian court reducing a sentence due to MAOA
* Though no such luck in New Mexico in 2021
* Scott Alexander’s classic 2019 article on candidate genes
* Failure to replicate the 5HTTLPR GxE as early as 2005
* 2009 meta-analysis with flat-as-a-pancake results for 5HTTLPR
* Letter about the lopsided nature of its citations
* 2011 “critical review” of candidate gene studies
* 2019 Border et al. study attempting to replicate depression candidate genes
* 2025 GWAS of depression
* A Google Scholar search for “5HTTLPR depression”, restricted to articles published in 2026
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

For a while in the early-to-mid 2010s, the most prominent psychology research in the world was on power posing. Harvard’s Amy Cuddy did a TED talk that reached tens of millions; her exhortation to “fake it til you make it” struck a chord and produced endless book sales from readers fascinated to hear how, just by adopting an expansive posture, you could revolutionise your own psychology and succeed at life.
In this episode, with the benefit of hindsight, we ask: what was that all about?
This podcast is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. In today’s episode we mentioned “The Perks of Being a Mole Rat”, Aria Shrecker’s entertaining new piece on what makes some animals live for an inordinately long time. Find it and endless other fascinating pieces on human progress at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Dana Carney (not Carvey)’s 2016 letter on changing her mind about power posing
* The 1996 study about walking more slowly down the hallway after reading words to do with old people
* Tom’s first and second pieces in Nature
* Daryl Bem’s piece on “Writing the Empirical Journal Article”
* Amy Cuddy’s TED talk (the third most-watched ever)
* Two studies we mentioned on the facial feedback hypothesis
* 2014 NYT article on power posing and Amy Cuddy
* Amy Cuddy’s bestselling book, Presence
* UK Conservative Party politicians power posing for some reason
* The original 2010 power posing paper in Psychological Science
* A re-examination of the robustness of the results
* Ranehill et al.’s 2015 replication attempt
* Cuddy et al.’s “summary and review” from the same issue
* Simmons & Simonsohn on the whole evidence base on power posing
* Cuddy’s strategic retreat
* Meta-analysis on expansive vs. “lack of contractive” posing
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

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Have you seen the award-winning film I Swear, about a Scottish man with Tourette’s? (The less said about what happened at the ceremony where it won said award, the better). If so, you might want to know more about this very weird medical condition. We’ve got you covered.
In this paid-only episode, we go into the competing neurological theories of what causes Tourette’s, the troubles with diagnosing it, what if anything can be done to treat it, and whether you can “catch” it by watching too many videos on TikTok.
Become a paying subscriber at sciencefictionspod.com (or click the button below) to hear the full episode and read the full show notes.