Out(right)liers: Or why Jonah Lehrer deserves more credit and Malcolm Gladwell deserves unemployment

I'm a psychologist by training. As a psychological researcher you learn many things. In my Ph.D. program we were taught the importance of skepticism, how to carefully design experiments to test research questions, and perhaps most importantly, we learned the value of properly interpreting psychological findings. The cardinal sin in research is to make conclusions that are not supported by the data.

In fact, this temptation to “go beyond the data” is so strong that academics have invented a “checks and balances” system to guard against it. It’s called peer review. In the academic world, if you submit a paper wherein the conclusions stretch beyond the data, you can expect to receive a swift smack-down from your peers.

What happens if you are unconstrained by these restrictions, have little to no training in science, and have a decent amount of influence? Simple, Malcolm Gladwell happens.