The BDLPSWDKS Effect
The BDLPSWDKS Effect
[Ponytail stands next to a screen displaying a firetruck hurtling toward Cueball on what appears to be a layer of gas.]
Ponytail: The Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect states that if a speeding fire truck lifts off and hurtles towards you on a layer of superheated gas, you'll dive out of the way faster if the driver screams "red!" in a non -tonal language that has a word for "firefighter" than if they scream "green!" in a tonal language with no word for "firefighter" which you think you're fluent in but aren't .

The BDLPSWDKS Effect in the title is an acronym for Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect, as explained by Ponytail in the comic. She stands in front of a slide that shows Cueball being subjected to this effect.
The effect mentioned appears to be a mashup of seven scientific principles (with nine scientists' names included) from physics and social sciences, with elements from each principle appearing in the resulting description of the effect:
This comic is probably a comment on the "replication crisis" in social psychology which has been in the news recently . For example, studies finding that merely thinking about intelligent people (e.g., writing down the attributes of a professor) will actually improve performance on math tests were once widely believed, and this "intelligence priming" effect is even included in textbooks. However, recent attempts to reproduce these effects have mostly failed and this failure to replicate is true of many social priming effects as well as other experiments in social psychology. Randall is also mocking the complicated, or even convoluted, setups often used in these experiments.
Usually, for an effect to be considered real, the scientific method requires the effect to be replicated by different experimenters in different times and places. It is hard to imagine several scientists in different parts of the world creating the setup to replicate this effect; however the title text mentions, sarcastically, that it has been done countless times.
Many other xkcd strips have commented on the ease with which surprising and novel, but false, results can be published in the scientific literature, such as 1478: P-Values and 882: Significant .
[Ponytail stands next to a screen displaying a firetruck hurtling toward Cueball on what appears to be a layer of gas.]
Ponytail: The Bernoulli-Doppler-Leidenfrost-Peltzman-Sapir-Whorf-Dunning-Kruger-Stroop Effect states that if a speeding fire truck lifts off and hurtles towards you on a layer of superheated gas, you'll dive out of the way faster if the driver screams "red!" in a non -tonal language that has a word for "firefighter" than if they scream "green!" in a tonal language with no word for "firefighter" which you think you're fluent in but aren't .
