Well, it happens a lot.

Just a couple months ago there was an article on mixx entitled “smarter women have bad sex” that was a perfect example of this bullshittery. I blew that story out of the water with mixx’s official “greatest comment of all time,” but this kind of thing happens a lot. (Not the great comment, that’s Honest Ape’s domain, I mean the crackpot study.)

I think about this sometimes because I’m interesting in psychology, but it wasn’t until yesterday when I was listening to NPR that I realized its true danger. There was some really cheesily done public service announcement with Jamie Lee Curtis talking about how “studies show that kids whose parents eat dinner with them regularly are less likely to do drugs” or something. I scoffed at the radio and ranted to Brennan all that way home about how misguided they were.

First of all, the study she mentioned was more than likely a non-experimental, correlational design. (Wordpress doesn’t think correlational is a word, but it is, I promise.) That means the psychologists went around handing out surveys asking people how often they ate with their family and whether or not they or their kids did drugs. This type of design is not highly regarded in psychology because it’s very weak. Your results rely entirely on what people decide to tell you and you just have to assume they’re telling the truth while remembering correctly. A lot of parents don’t have a clue what their kids are doing, so collecting accurate data for this particular study would be nearly impossible. A psychologist can pretty much make any claim they want about people and “prove” it with such a design. Sometimes longitudinal studies are taken seriously, but I highly doubt this study was such.

Secondly, correlation does not equal causality! People have such a hard time with this for some damn reason. Even if it is true that families who eat dinner together are less likely to have children with drug habits, it’s not a testament to the magical power of eating dinner together. Eating dinner together is a lot more likely to be a symptom of a healthy family for a wide variety of reasons; parents who make the effort for family time are involved, caring, supportive, etc. If a family is already hopelessly broken, then forcing the kids to the dinner table is only going to aggravate the situation.

The final reason why these studies are dangerous is because they lead people to believe that small actions can solve problems that require a great deal of work. If you’re a parent who has a kid on drugs, please don’t ask them to dinner and think you’re doing something about their drug problem. It takes a lot to overcome or prevent addiction and, in my humble opinion, psychologists who lead people to believe otherwise are a shame to the profession.