Identifying and clarifying arguments in a recent debate regarding measures based on memory-based methods.

Two recent commentaries published in this journal argued against the usefulness of memory-based dietary assessment methods (M-BMs). A pair of responding commentaries disputed those negative claims regarding M-BMs and defended the usefulness of M-BMs. This article is intended to clarify the claims made in the four commentaries cited previously, identify the manner in which those claims have been supported, and suggest possible ways forward.

The effect of ad hominem attacks on the evaluation of claims promoted by scientists.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the relative impact of direct and indirect (ad hominem) attacks on science claims. Four hundred and thirty-nine college students (Experiment 1) and 199 adults (Experiment 2) read a series of science claims and indicated their attitudes towards those claims. Each claim was paired with one of the following: A) a direct attack upon the empirical basis of the science claim B) an ad hominem attack on the scientist who made the claim or C) both.

Replication Rate, Framing, and Format Affect Attitudes and Decisions about Science Claims.

A series of five experiments examined how the evaluation of a scientific finding was influenced by information about the number of studies that had successfully replicated the initial finding. The experiments also tested the impact of frame (negative, positive) and numeric format (percentage, natural frequency) on the evaluation of scientific findings. In Experiments 1 through 4, an attitude difference score served as the dependent measure, while a measure of choice served as the dependent measure in Experiment 5.