https://xcancel.com/SwipeWright/status/2090215046039080969
The first-ever Peer Review has now been published in Theory and Society!
Kevin McCaffree and I launched this project to create a mechanism for holding influential papers in science and medicine accountable when the peer-review process that was designed to catch serious errors prior to publication fails to do so.
This inaugural Peer Review, by Peter DeScioli, critiques a 2026 paper in Royal Society Open Science claiming that exposure to a 7-minute clip from a lecture on evolutionary psychology caused people to blame r@pe victims.
But the paper's results don't support that conclusion.
Participants who watched the evo psych lecture did not significantly differ from the control group in victim blaming, and only one of six predicted comparisons was significant, and it had a very small effect that would not survive a proper statistical correction for multiple comparisons.
Even worse, the alternative video literally instructed participants not to blame the victim in a scenario closely matching the experiment, which contaminated the condition with what's called a "demand effect," which is where subtle cues or hints reveals the study's goal to the participants and influences their behavior. Reanalyzing the data with proper and more rigorous methods found no significant differences at all.
The review also documents serious theoretical problems and mischaracterizations of evolutionary psychology, such as the authors repeatedly portraying the field as claiming behavior is "hardwired," despite the cited evolutionary psychologists explicitly rejecting that framing.
Publication should not be the end of peer review, but the true start of it. When the ordinary review process fails to screen out poor methods and ideological nonsense, we need a second line of defense.
This is exactly why we created Peer Review at @Theory_Society!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09742-7
