Psychology and More

The New York Times has a short piece on the Deiderik Stapel academic fraud incident I wrote about earlier. There are now “several dozen” papers involved. The investigating committee, for reasons unfathomable to me, has not released a list of  the papers. To me “several” implies more than 4, and less than 12. So there are somewhere around 50-100 papers possibly involved. That is huge, and for now I think we will simply have to avoid citing any of his work.

Link to the NY Times article.

This week in class, we discussed Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments and saw the original film, Obedience, that he produced. Sunday night at 9pm EST on Discovery, there will be a show on people’s capacity for evil, which will have a Milgram experiment replication. The Advances in the History of Psychology blog mentioned it and gives details here.

Just in time for our third exam, the Wall Street Journal summarizes some research on studying for best test performance. here are some of the tips:

• testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory
• Review the toughest material right before going to bed the night before the test
• A common study habit—the all-nighter—is a bad idea
• High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best for breakfast the day of the test
• Information reviewed amid distractions is less likely to be recalled later

Regarding anxiety about the exam:

• One calming tactic that has been shown to improve scores is to teach yourself in advance to think differently about the test—using visualization techniques
• reducing “novelty and stress on the day of the exam” can prevent choking under pressure
• If you are still feeling anxious, set aside 10 minutes beforehand to write down your worries

See the full article here.

In class Thursday, we discussed memory and social judgment, which led to a discussion of eyewitness testimony in court trials. The blog LiveScience covers some issues around reliability of memory, particularly in the context of eyewitness testimony. Have a look at it here.

Last night’s execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis reportedly sent those convinced of Davis’ innocence into hysterics. One of their concerns — that eyewitness testimony in the case had been recanted — also concerns cognitive scientists.

“This is not the first time a person is pretty much convicted based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence,” said Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, adding that the number of eyewitnesses who later recanted their testimony was “relatively unusual.”

PsyBlog covers a good exchange between two research teams about whether familiarity with others induces us to like them more or to dislike them. The literature generally supports the liking side of the debate, and when teaching it, that’s what professors generally emphasize. But this exchange points out how science works: we challenge the status quo and sometimes find surprising results (and suffer the slings and arrows of the establishment). If the results can be replicated and extended, then we learn a whole lot more about behavior.

We will be talking about some heuristics in Social Psychology, and Mind Hacks linked to this talk by Daniel Kahneman talking at an Edge conference. I have not had time to view it, but I am sure it’s quite interesting.

The following was issued by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology regarding the academic misconduct I wrote about earlier:

Diederik Stapel, a prolific social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has just been fired from his job after admitting to fabricating data in some of his studies. This is serious scientific misconduct, and just like plagiarism or other academic misconduct by undergraduate or graduate students, it is not tolerated.

What makes it worse is that if he collaborated with anyone on these publications, they have to be included in the retractions, so that damages their reputation and also causes them to lose valuable publication credits, which are the currency of academics.

Details can be found in this article from Science magazine.

The only comfort in this is that at least we walk the walk – when we impress on our students the seriousness of academic misconduct, they can be sure we apply the same high standards to ourselves.

The ever-excellent blog Mind Hacks pointed me toward a special open-access edition of the British Psychological Society’s magazine The Psychologist which covers Stanley Milgram, including articles by psychologists, a historian, and even Milgram’s widow.

Very much worth checking out.

There’s 5 articles in total:

The shock of the old—Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam introduce a special feature which reconnects with Milgram’s vision for social psychology

The man, his passions and motivations—Stanley Milgram’s widow, Alexandra Milgram, with her personal take on his life

Alive and well after all these years—Jerry M. Burger updates the enduring legacy of the Milgram Obedience Studies

The window in the laboratory—Film scholar Kathryn Millard looks at Stanley Milgram as filmmaker

Milgram and the historians—Richard Overy, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, in conversation with Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam

In our first Social Psychology class, I asked students to write something unique about themselves on an index card (as a way of getting to know them). I then asked if they had

Used under Creative Commons license, from Flickr user mikedefiant

any questions about me. I was asked about what my favorite concert was, a question I enjoyed answering.

A recent article in the Huffington Post covers some research by Sam Gosling and colleagues showing that knowing someone’s musical taste gives us some pretty decent information to guess their personality (link to the PDF of their Psychological Science article). It also covered some recent research that shows it tells us whether we might like the person.

we often ask people about their musical preferences because musical taste serves as an easy indicator of whether we are likely to be similar to new people in ways that will influence how much we like them.