This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com The evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for young people with gender dysphoria is “remarkably weak”. That’s according to the Cass Review, a new in-depth report commissioned by NHS England. As you might imagine, the report’s conclusions have been somewhat controversial. In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart read through the Cass Report, consider the argument...
Apr 23, 2024•11 min
Several previous episodes of The Studies Show have covered depression and treatments for it, but none have really considered what depression is . It’s time to do that. It turns out that some scientists have made serious critiques of the standard way of thinking about depression, and argue that we need a revolution in the way we measure it. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart take nothing for granted - they look into the idea of “latent variables”, read the studies critiquing the...
Apr 16, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Everything is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World . That’s the new book—out on April 25 in the UK and May 7 in the US —by our very own Tom Chivers! In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart cover some of the historical sections of the book, and talk about where some of our basic ideas about probability come from (it turns out to be a weird combination of inveterate gamblers and Presbyterian ministers). The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress Magazi...
Apr 09, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Microplastics are everywhere: there are teeny-tiny plastic particles in your drinking water, your food, your air - and perhaps even in your internal organs. How worried should you be? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the research on microplastics, covering all the reasons that the health effects of microscopic particles are not straightforward to study. They also look in detail at a scary new study that apparently found, according to one headline, that microplastics...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 1 min
As an extra way of thanking our paid subscribers, we’re going to post some shorter episodes in addition to the usual weekly hour-long ones. This first short episode (available to everyone for free; after this they’re paid-only) is about the idea of Emotional Intelligence. Does your “EQ” matter as much as your “IQ”? How can you even test that, anyway? To listen to future short episodes, as well as accessing all our paid-only stuff, you need to become a paid subscriber. Go to www.thestudiesshowpod...
Mar 29, 2024•23 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Most people think it’s obvious that you should wear a helmet when cycling. It might save your life if you fall off and hit your head. Duh. But over the years, many contrarian arguments have pushed back against this seemingly-obvious point. What if people engage in “risk compensation”, where they cycle more dangerously because they know they’re wearing a helmet? What about if encouraging helments puts people o...
Mar 26, 2024•10 min
We all love to cite meta-analyses. They’re the review studies where scientists take every single piece of research ever published on a particular question, and then calculate the overall “true” effect across all of them. Putting together all those studies is a much better way to get to the truth… isn’t it? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart give a intro to meta-analysis, and then talk about several major problems with the whole idea. Is meta-analysis—relied upon for making so m...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Don’t worry, it’s nothing important this week - only the origin of all life on planet Earth . No biggie. Sure, life evolved by natural selection, but to get evolution going, you need to have life in the first place. So where did it come from? Scientists have theories about “abiogenesis” - the moment around 3.5 billion years ago when, having never existed before, biology began. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the theories, and some of the recent studies where scient...
Mar 12, 2024•59 min
The discourse has once again turned to a feverish discussion of cognitive decline. Which 2024 US Presidential candidate has it worse? What does that mean for the campaign and for the Presidency in general? In this episode of The Studies Show , your rapidly-ageing hosts look at some of the research on cognitive ageing and cognitive decline. What happens when you give cognitive tests to people of different ages? Do those tests actually matter? They then ask whether there’s a chance that the receiv...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Mistakes were made. By us. In this Mea Culpa episode we discuss several of them, big and small, from multiple previous episodes. If you’ve noticed us make a mistake on The Studies Show , please do get in touch on thestudiesshowpod@substack.com, and we’ll include it in a future Mea Culpa! Show notes * Eiko Fried’s research on the definition of depression (we’ll do a whole episode on this!) * The new BMJ meta-analysis on exercise and depression that came out literally one day after we discussed th...
Mar 01, 2024•25 min
Remember when the airwaves were full of people questioning the idea of man-made climate change? You don’t hear much from them any more - in large part becuase the evidence that our CO2 emissions are altering the climate has become so overwhelming. After a recap on how we know that carbon warms the climate, Tom and Stuart use this episode of The Studies Show to discuss climate predictions—er, I mean, projections —and how accurate they’ve been. They ask whether the media always gets it right when ...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Hans Eysenck was one of the biggest names in psychology. Was he also a scientific fraudster? Long after his death, allegations resurfaced about his late-career studies, which either contained some of the most impressive findings in medical history, were a terrible mistake… or were the result of something much more sinister. In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart tell the shocking—and o...
Feb 20, 2024•11 min
Okay, whether exercise is good isn’t really in question. But there are so many pseudoscientific myths surrounding sports and exercise that it’s always worth looking more closely at some of the claims. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into two widely-believed claims about exercise. First, does stretching your muscles before exercising actually help you in any way? Second, does exercise help alleviate the symptoms of depression? And then, they ask a bonus question inspired...
Feb 13, 2024•55 min
What treatment works best for people with depression? Is it psychodynamic psychotherapy, in the Freudian tradition, with its emphasis on hidden, unconscious desires? Or is it Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, based on more contemporary (and less, y’know, made up) ways of thinking about psychology? How do you even do a good study on something as complicated as psychological therapy, anyway? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom (ego) and Stuart (superego) talk about two recent reviews that summa...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Everyone seems to have decided that it’s the phones. That is, they’ve decided that heavy smartphone and social-media use is to blame for the current wave of mental illness, despair, and depression that’s affecting young people - teenage girls in particular. Except… we need to ask how strong the evidence is. What do the studies actually show about what’s causing the mental health crisis? And, wait - is there actually a mental health crisis to begin with? In this extra-long episode of The Studies ...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 20 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Either there are massive differences between the brains of men and women, or there aren’t any notable differences at all - and people who think differences exist are “neurosexists”. It’s easy to find well-qualified scientists making each of these arguments. They can’t all be right. What’s going on? What do the biggest and best MRI studies of brain sex differences tell us? Do we know what causes them, or how t...
Jan 23, 2024•10 min
Why do some people love parties and others prefer to stay at home with a book? Why do some people worry endlessly about all the bad things that might happen, while others breeze through life with supreme confidence? Why is Stuart such a nice guy and Tom far less so? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss personality and the personality tests that are supposed to measure it. They discuss whether it might be the Big Five or the Big Six, what measuring personality is good for,...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 3 min
It’s mentioned on the podcast pretty much every week. But what does “statistical significance” actually mean? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart start 2024 off with the most exciting subject possible: p -values. THRILL as they discuss statistical misconceptions! MARVEL as they talk about how “effect size” differs from “statistical significance”! CHUCKLE as they resort to endless coin-flipping analogies! And GASP as they discuss ways to stop scientists from “hacking” their p -va...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 7 min
We admit it: The Studies Show tends to be quite negative. We’re always complaining about low-quality studies, faulty reasoning, and bad science. Not this time! In this end-of-year special, Tom and Stuart discuss the good science news from the past year, covering all the coolest technologies and most life-saving medical advances from 2023. See you in 2024 - oh, and pre-order Tom’s book on Bayes ! Credits The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions . This is a public epi...
Dec 29, 2023•51 min
Every so often there’s a panic in the media: sperm count is declining! The human race is on the way out! New studies regularly appear that seem to support this idea. The recent book Count Down by epidemiologist Shanna Swan argued vociferously that the culprit is plastic pollution, which apparently releases endocrine-disrupting chemicals that ruin our fertility. Is any of that true? What do the meta-analyses, which try to gather together all the evidence on sperm counts over time, really say on t...
Dec 19, 2023•59 min
If you were to list the top 5 most hyped areas of science right now, the microbiome would clearly be one. The collection of billions of microbes that live in our gut—and which are studied by collecting, er, “stool samples”—have been blamed for causing not just gastrointestinal symptoms, but even mental health disorders. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the microbiome: what’s the evidence that it contributes to all our ills? Can it really be the case that we can transp...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 2 min
“Science is political”. How could it not be? It’s done by humans, whose political biases will influence not just the topics they choose to study but also how they study them. But does that mean it’s fine for scientists to blatantly bring their politics into their work? Does that mean it’s okay for scientific journals to endorse political candidates? In this slightly unusual episode of The Studies Show (which doesn’t include very many actual studies), Tom and Stuart discuss the never-ending debat...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 7 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com It’s November, so a strange subset of “very online” men are trying to avoid, er, “self-abuse” for the entirety of the month. They’re doing it because they believe it has all sorts of psychological and health benefits. But others argue that No Nut November could itself cause you harm. Who’s right? In this ADULTS ONLY episode of The Studies Show which they…...
Nov 28, 2023•11 min
Teaching kids how to read is amazingly controversial. Or at least, it was controversial until recently, when we achieved a proper scientific consensus that the best way to teach them is to use systematic phonics . This method has seen big successes here in the UK, and is helping thousands of children achieve proper literacy. …that’s the story, anyway. But how strong is that scientific consensus? What evidence do we have that systematic phonics is the best way to learn to read? In this episode of...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Here’s another brief episode covering the errors we’ve made in our last few episodes, from the very minor to the somewhat more serious. We’re grateful to listeners who pointed these out - please keep doing so! If you’ve noticed an error on The Studies Show , let us know and we’ll correct it on a future episode like this. Contact details are on the About page. Show notes * UNSCEAR numbers on birth defects caused by Chernobyl * Adjusting for publication bias makes the effect of cash transfers on m...
Nov 18, 2023•15 min
The thesis of Johann Hari’s bestselling 2022 book Stolen Focus is that tech companies—via the internet, smartphones, and social media—are wrecking our attention spans. Hari argues that Facebook, Apple, and all the rest, in their deliberate attack on our ability to concentrate, are doing huge damage to the human species. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart (whose microphone sounds a bit odd this week - sorry about that!) discuss the data on whether people’s attention spans are ge...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min
What causes Alzheimer’s? The main theory is that it’s due to a build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain. But some scientists think that’s hopelessly wrong, and that a hidebound belief in the amyloid hypothesis is stopping us from finding a cure. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart talk about the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, ask whether all the hype over the three recent Alzheimer’s drugs (“a momentous breakthrough!”) is justified, and look at some ways we could do better r...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Welcome to a very spooky episode of The Studies Show, on the topic of parapsychology. Tom and Stuart discuss telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and more, and look at some of the most recent attempts by scientists to show that these weird—and did we mention spooky ?—psychic phenomena are real. Can it really be the case that studies claiming the existence of psychic powers get published in mainstream scientific journals? What does this mean for how seriously we take scientific journals? And is...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 1 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com If you catch COVID, what’s the chance the symptoms will last for months? And what’s the chance they’ll be so debilitating that they ruin your life? Different studies have given wildly different answers to these questions - in part because they define “Long COVID” in all sorts of different ways. In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart try to work out what’s going on. How good is the rese...
Oct 24, 2023•11 min
With major (alleged!) misconduct cases happening at some of the biggest US universities, scientific fraud has been in the news a lot recently. If you’re a scientist you’re supposed to be discovering the truth - so why do some scientists (allegedly - please don’t sue us!) just make all their results up? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss some outrageous instances of scientific fraud, and how they were discovered. They look at all the reasons a scientist might decide to b...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 10 min
