Seán Roberts Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 14;8(8):e70902. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070902. eCollection 2013.
The recent proliferation of digital databases of cultural and linguistic data, together with new statistical techniques becoming available has lead to a rise in so-called nomothetic studies [1]-[8]. These seek relationships between demographic variables and cultural traits from large, cross-cultural datasets. The insights from these studies are important for understanding how cultural traits evolve. While these studies are fascinating and are good at generating testable hypotheses, they may underestimate the probability of finding spurious correlations between cultural traits. Here we show that this kind of approach can find links between such unlikely cultural traits as traffic accidents, levels of extra-martial sex, political collectivism and linguistic diversity. This suggests that spurious correlations, due to historical descent, geographic diffusion or increased noise-to-signal ratios in large datasets, are much more likely than some studies admit. We suggest some criteria for the evaluation of nomothetic studies and some practical solutions to the problems. Since some of these studies are receiving media attention without a widespread understanding of the complexities of the issue, there is a risk that poorly controlled studies could affect policy. We hope to contribute towards a general skepticism for correlational studies by demonstrating the ease of finding apparently rigorous correlations between cultural traits. Despite this, we see well-controlled nomothetic studies as useful tools for the development of theories.
最近，文化和语言数据的数字数据库大量涌现，同时新的统计技术也不断问世，这导致了所谓的“规律研究”[1]-[8]的兴起。这些研究旨在从大型跨文化数据集中寻找人口统计学变量与文化特征之间的关系。这些研究的见解对于理解文化特征的演变很重要。虽然这些研究很吸引人，并且善于提出可检验的假设，但它们可能低估了在文化特征之间发现虚假相关的可能性。在这里，我们表明，这种方法可以在交通事故、婚外性行为水平、政治集体主义和语言多样性等不太可能的文化特征之间找到联系。这表明，由于历史传承、地理扩散或在大型数据集中文本与噪声的比例增加，虚假相关的可能性比一些研究承认的要大得多。我们为规律研究提出了一些评估标准，并为解决这些问题提出了一些实际的解决方案。由于一些此类研究在没有广泛了解问题复杂性的情况下受到媒体关注，因此控制不佳的研究可能会影响政策。我们希望通过展示在文化特征之间找到明显严格相关的容易程度，对相关性研究产生普遍的怀疑态度。尽管如此，我们认为，精心控制的规律研究仍然是发展理论的有用工具。
