Want more evidence of the weak habits of some academic researchers?

According to the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy,” social scientists are increasingly tapping into a cheap research pool, college students, to tell us “about how we feel, think and behave.”

The problem is these students are not “representative by age, wealth, income,” etc., and they as a group are not “homogeneous.”

Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, blames the nation’s “scientific reward structure,” which “does not benefit someone who puts in the enormous effort” to come up with a representative research sample.