Re:How Social Isolation Is Killing Us
by cableshaft on Thursday December 22, 2016 @05:36PM
(#13241011)
Older research is generally given less credence than newer research because of certain assumptions which may or may not be accurate:
* That the researchers looked into previous research, examined those results, and are either replicating them (thus adding extra evidence to those hypothesis), or have found some sort of flaw in how the research was gathered.
* That the researches have, in their research, looked into multiple previous studies, including the old one you referenced, and synthesized them all for their new research.
* It's often been shown that older research studies are flawed in some way, especially in certain fields, such as nutrition, so older studies should be held suspect (really the newer studies should be held with just as much skepticism, but they never are)
Again, the assumptions that this is done is not necessarily what happened in reality, but without media or laypeople doing their own research into things (and neither have time for that), it's usually a useful greedy heuristic to assume newer research is better and more accurate than older research.
* That the researchers looked into previous research, examined those results, and are either replicating them (thus adding extra evidence to those hypothesis), or have found some sort of flaw in how the research was gathered.
* That the researches have, in their research, looked into multiple previous studies, including the old one you referenced, and synthesized them all for their new research.
* It's often been shown that older research studies are flawed in some way, especially in certain fields, such as nutrition, so older studies should be held suspect (really the newer studies should be held with just as much skepticism, but they never are)
Again, the assumptions that this is done is not necessarily what happened in reality, but without media or laypeople doing their own research into things (and neither have time for that), it's usually a useful greedy heuristic to assume newer research is better and more accurate than older research.