If the research was anything like the psychology studies I participated in as a college student, it is a far reach from college students paid to pretend to "interview a job applicant", to conclusions about a professional interviewer.
With nothing else on the line (your reputation, income, self-image), its easy for the warm coffee or comfy chair to dominate your attitude.
What if I said that participants' physiology (stress response, in this case) is completely different depending on a single variable: being interviewed by a person, versus giving an unprepared speech to a camera about why you should be hired.
You can be as cynical as you want, but there's no justification for ignoring good experimental design and the statistics that demonstrate it's unlikely that people would react so differently based on the camera/person condition.
The evidence is: if you interview in front of a person, your blood pressure is demonstrably higher, your palms sweat more, and you self-report that you were stressed out. In front of a camera, the averageperson does not exhibit a stress response.
You're not the first to observe that college students are a poor stand-in for the general population, but I have experience with one of the labs that conducted this work, and they did extensive "general population" work as well, which means it's not all college students.
So many of these naive criticisms are addressed in the paper itself - if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote (i.e. "read the science".)
> if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote
To do that, I'd have to either pay $15 (for just this one paper) or take a trip to my local university library.
You're free to chastise people all you like, but as long as the actual papers are locked up behind paywalls, it's quite difficult to "read the science".
You can still get this kind of literature from a library, though - especially university libraries. It's like how books aren't free, yet you can still read them for free by going to the library.
Still confused and doubtful: how does the camera/person issue relate to the coffee mug/comfy chair? The article (which I was criticising) made extraordinary claims about mind control and inanimate objects.
Even if the interview process you describe was part of the 'science' (not evident from the article we're commenting on) then its not the camera, but the actual person that is responsible for the stress response. Isn't it ludicrous to attribute it to the camera?
Finally, social 'science' is mostly cargo-cult science. There are such inadequate attempts to control variables, so little effort to even understand the variables, that doing statistics appropriate for physics and chemistry are inadequate and wildly misleading.
