Guest Talk with Sarah Perry | Protocols of Reproducible Science

Sarah Perry argues that most social-science abstract nouns—aggression, humility, the subconscious—are 'weasel words' whose laboratory operationalizations (the Bobo doll, Taylor aggression paradigm, self-report surveys) are so varied and arbitrary that they fail to measure anything generalizable, a pattern she calls 'protocol as alibi' where following procedure substitutes for real knowledge. She contrasts this with 'protocol as checksum,' where minor, publicly checkable procedural details (IRB approval, properly sourced gel images, unmanipulated data files) serve as tells for whether hidden parts of a study were actually done honestly, illustrated through cases like Hwang Woo-suk's cloning fraud and Dan Ariely's disputed honesty and placebo studies. Venkatesh Rao introduces the talk by linking Perry's earlier ribbonfarm writing on architecture and ritual to her current focus on reproducibility and the generalizability crisis.