Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiments on ABC’s Radio National

Courtesy ABC

The blog Advances in the History of Psychology pointed me toward an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show covering the now-famous Robbers Cave experiments conducted by Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues. It includes fascinating audio from the experiments, interviews with adults who were the boys at the camps, interviews with one of the experimenters (OJ Harvey), etc. It raises some significant ethical issues, as well as some methodological issues. Highly recommended if you’re into social psychology.

Link to the ABC show web page to listen to it.

How to woo a scientist

The Guardian (UK) has a hilarious article about how to find and pluck the heart strings of your nearest scientist. Here’s the link.

My favorite quotes:

“Scientists can be hard to locate. They rarely frequent sporting events, popular music concerts, fairgrounds, organised cockfights or wherever it is non-scientists choose to congregate. A typical scientist is usually found in the laboratory.”

“There are instances where you will encounter a scientist outside of the laboratory environment. They may be giving a lecture, or possibly standing in an exotic location looking wistful. In both of these instances, engaging in conversation is impractical, given the context. … If you’re lucky, you may encounter one in a pub or similar establishment. … if you see someone who is clearly under the influence of alcohol but still using words of 5 syllables or more, then they’re likely to be a scientist.”

“When attempting to talk to a scientist, be sure you don’t say anything that might be interpreted as a claim unless you are certain it has been peer-reviewed or subjected to rigorous statistical assessment.”

“Should the conversation falter or hit a lull, try asking the question “How is your grant application going?” This is likely to result in a very long rant about the problems, frustrations and possible illegitimate birth origins of those involved with the grant approval process.”

I/O Psychologist John Karlin’s Obituary

There is an obituary for industrial psychologist John Karlin in the NY Times. His research team at Bell Labs was responsible for how telephones were designed around the capabilities of humans.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

Link to the article.

Mechanical Turk and Clinical Populations

Last night in Intro to Psychogical Testing, we discussed the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system for recruiting participants for reliability studies. The new APS journal Clinical Psychological Science just published an article on the quality and characteristics of Mechanical Turk workers in relation to clinincal variables. Specifically, there was a much higher prevalence of social anxiety, unemployment, and potential substance use disorder. This is good for people studying these areas, but for those studying factors that might intercorrelate with those, it may be a suspect source of participants. Overall though, the reliability between the first wave and second wave of data collection was high, which means that Mturk might be a good place to run reliability and validity studies.

Here’s a link to the article at Clinical Psychological Science.

Social Priming, Failed Replications, and Egos

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good article on social priming—the effects on our behavior from subtle cues in our social environment. It reviews some of the key studies such as the famous elderly prime makes people walk more slowly finding. There is an appropriately strong focus on John Bargh, whose studies made the effect well known, as well as some of the individuals who have had trouble replicating his results. As it remains today, there is serious doubt about whether the effect is very robust. Instead, there might be some moderators that enhance or weaken the effect that are unknown. If there is anything good coming out of this, it may be that we start begin respecting the publication of failed replications. That will be good for the entire discipline.

Link to the article at the Chronicle.

Image courtesy Flickr user sunnydelishgirl. Licensed under Creative Commons