[will_work4tears]

My place of employment was funded a grant, and did a study to show that teens were using mobile devices more often than they did years ago (I don't remember the timeframe). I believe they got something like a 200k+ grant for this. A team of like 10 PhD psychologists to show something we already know.

Not saying psychology as a field is pointless, or anything, just that they do occasionally do some silly studies.

[superuser2]

Therein lies the problem. On many of the questions that psychology studies, people are deeply committed to an intuitive answer.

A layperson reading any psychology experiment will either say "That's obvious! You spent how much establishing something everyone already knows?" or "No way. You must be twisting the data to make a name for yourself." Particularly when it touches hot-button issues like "to what extent are [people I don't like] in control of their own situations?"

You don't get that around physics quite so much.

[vacri]

You're probably oversimplifying the study considerably, but even so, even things that "everyone knows" need to be formally studied. All across science, non-intuitive results happen all the time. In psychology, it's even more common, since biology doesn't play by the relatively clean rules of materials physics.

After all, "everyone knows" that blacks are inferior and only useful as slaves (they even want to be, deep down); "everyone knows" that women are too temperamental to vote sensibly; "everyone knows" that people of that religion over there eat babies and we should destroy them before they destroy us...

For a more recent example, "everyone knows" that young people use condoms more often now, given the higher levels of sex education about pregnancy and STIs they've grown up with - yet regional studies often show significantly decreased levels of condom use. Another one is the assumption that the current crop of young'uns are fantastic with understanding computers due to growing up with them, yet this hasn't been borne out in studies. Turned out that consuming from a device doesn't mean you understand how it works any better.

Such studies are particularly important at ferretting out what's happening with people who aren't society's favourites - we all know what a man is, right? Always looking to get laid, not afraid to get physical, plays sport, drinks beer. Most men are like that, right? Not really; there's actually a huge variety of interests and desires. Studies of 'obvious!' things are just as necessary as fringe things, because sometimes the results are really quite unexpected.

[will_work4tears]

"After all, "everyone knows" that blacks are inferior and only useful as slaves (they even want to be, deep down); "everyone knows" that women are too temperamental to vote sensibly; "everyone knows" that people of that religion over there eat babies and we should destroy them before they destroy us..."

This is simply not true at all these days, and I don't like that HN users would push a normal conversation into one where you imply your "opponent" is racist, sexist, or a religious bigot. Might as well have called me a Nazi or brought Hitler into the conversation.

And I don't believe you need Psychologists or a peer reviewed study to discern mobile platform usage, we have other ways to getting said metrics.