The Crusade Against Multiple Regression Analysis

[bemildred]

A huge range of science projects are done with multiple regression analysis. The results are often somewhere between meaningless and quite damaging. ...

I hope that in the future, if I’m successful in communicating with people about this, that there’ll be a kind of upfront warning in New York Times articles: These data are based on multiple regression analysis. This would be a sign that you probably shouldn’t read the article because you’re quite likely to get non-information or misinformation.

RICHARD NISBETT is professor of psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author, most recently, of Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking; and The Geography of Thought. Richard Nisbett's Edge Bio Page.

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THE CRUSADE AGAINST MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS

The thing I’m most interested in right now has become a kind of crusade against correlational statistical analysis—in particular, what’s called multiple regression analysis. Say you want to find out whether taking Vitamin E is associated with lower prostate cancer risk. You look at the correlational evidence and indeed it turns out that men who take Vitamin E have lower risk for prostate cancer. Then someone says, "Well, let’s see if we do the actual experiment, what happens." And what happens when you do the experiment is that Vitamin E contributes to the likelihood of prostate cancer. How could there be differences? These happen a lot. The correlational—the observational—evidence tells you one thing, the experimental evidence tells you something completely different.

http://edge.org/conversation/richard_nisbett-the-crusade-against-multiple-regression-analysis