Sanquinity t1_iwsi6br wrote
Reply to comment by Agile-Cancel-4709 in Rats bop to the beat of music by Mozart, Lady Gaga, Queen; bopping was previously thought to be an ability innately unique to humans by marketrent
Made me think the people behind this "study" didn't do any actual research into the subject beforehand. Like, it's a well known thing that many domesticated birds not only jam to music, but have individual music preferences.
Adventurous-Text-680 t1_iwso3y1 wrote
To be fair they qualify the statement:
> “Rats displayed innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization,”
I imagine they did research but didn't find much in the way of actual studies. I tried a search, and didn't really find anything. The one about birds was based on a single bird named "snowball" and the study was done after seeing videos of the bird on YouTube.
The thing is this is a bird that was "corrupted" in the sense of could have been trained and the studies used songs that the bird was already familiar with. So it's a bit different than this study where the rats were not previously exposed to music or trained.
QuincyAzrael t1_iwu3t4q wrote
It may be a "well known thing" but unless it has been formally studied you can't cite it as research.
CarlPeligro t1_iwum3a6 wrote
I see this all the time on Reddit, so I'm not necessarily singling you out, but how arrogant do we have to be to assume that we randos of Reddit know a given subject matter better than people who have spent their entire adult lives researching it?
>Made me think the people behind this "study" didn't do any actual research into the subject beforehand
Like, your assertion is that these people invested a few years of their lives arranging this study, spent many more years in their field preparing for a study like it -- but didn't bother to google the subject! It's a silly thing to believe and it's not at all how these sorts of studies work. If they didn't mention the information you were expecting, it's likely because a) at the end of the day they didn't consider it relevant b) they did mention it but you didn't actually read the study c) they referenced it indirectly but you're not familiar enough with the subject to know the technical terms they used to do so.
In reading these sorts of things I, as a non-scientist, tend to give scientists the benefit of the doubt at least this far: these people almost certainly know the subject matter better than I do, and they're almost certainly not lazy. This does not commit me to believing in their findings or to accepting those findings in an uncritical way, but it spares me from the hubris of reading something I don't like or understand and concluding that "these idiots don't know what they're talking about; couldn't they be bothered to perform a ten-second google search -- "
Sanquinity t1_iwumjk5 wrote
I guess you could call me jaded, as this subreddit gets tons of "studies" that, when I looked into them, had poor methods or clear bias towards their conclusions. Though I will admit I didn't look into this particular study. Just very quickly skimmed the article.
Cool_Dream3162 t1_iwvni6z wrote
I see this all the time on reddit. Ppl just believe anything they see because it was called a "study" also this is the internet, there are billions who use it, you don't know what knowledge someone else has on the other side of that comment.
[deleted] t1_ix74joe wrote
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