Bem is a social psychologist from Cornell University, now retired at age 85. In the end, the consensus about Bem’s research was mostly not that he used mainstream tools of statistical analytics improperly. The UBC folk didn’t want their sample to include the long-term homeless, so to be eligible, participants had to have been homeless for less than two years. Also, they rejected severe drug and alcohol abusers and the mentally ill.Why reject the most problematic, messed-up and socially costly victims of homelessness from a study of homelessness? Bad news, one might think, for a scientific study literally purporting to prove that stereotypes of the homeless as impulsive and untrustworthy are mistaken.
