Category: social psychology
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Is social psychology self-correcting?
I have a new essay up at Heterodox Academy discussing the claim that science is self-correcting. I also dig a bit more into what we mean by “bias”. As a reminder, Heterodox Academy is a motley crew of scholars concerned about ideological conformity and intolerance in modern academia. We’re privileged to have Jon Haidt, Steven…
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Are minorities throttling their efforts?
I offer some 3 am musings on the possibility. Historic comments from the years this site was hosted on Weebly MikeR10/15/2015 02:56:07 pm Interesting article. I don’t know how to make it better, but I know from my own confusion that the title is confusing. I had to read a few paragraphs before I understood that…
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What I’ve learned researching the emotion of envy
My empirical work has mostly focused on the emotion of envy. I have a lot of data that I need to publish. I’ve been frozen lately by a sort of methodological crisis and metamorphosis. I started thinking about a number of validity issues after working on the BBS paper, and I couldn’t move forward with…
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Minors, Lewandowsky, and Ceremonial Ethics
The Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer paper in PLOS ONE has been substantially corrected. I had alerted the journal last fall that there were serious errors in the paper, including the presence of a 32,757-year-old in the data, along with a 5-year-old and six other self-reported minors. The paleoparticipant in particular had knocked out the true…
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Ideologically-fueled research
In my comment on Piercarlo Valdesolo’s excellent Scientific American guest column on our paper, I wrote up some points that deserve separate post. I’ll expand on these issues in journal publications. Some people come into social psychology with a political agenda – their research and careers are driven by left-wing ideology. A common pattern is…
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Spending money on experiences instead of objects makes you happier
This is a popular idea, has gotten good coverage, most recently in FastCo. Leaf Van Boven has been doing great work on this for years. (He was Gilovich’s graduate student – the FastCo article quotes Gilovich a lot because it’s based on a new review article by Gilovich & Kumar.)One of the things I want…
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p-values banned
This is so refreshing. The Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology has banned p-values. And confidence intervals. Their reasons are extremely good reasons, and well-articulated. I forgot to stress this point explicitly in the recent essay on the Lewandowsky fraud, but descriptive statistics always trump inferential. A p-value has no inherent substantive meaning, nor…
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37.5%
I don’t think I fully processed the implications of the Inbar and Lammers data. 37.5% of social psychologists in their survey explicitly reported a willingness to discriminate against conservative job candidates. These are people who chose the midpoint or higher, where the midpoint was Somewhat inclined to favor a liberal vs. conservative candidate. The 37.5% figure…