Personality Blogger’s Roundtable
Brent Roberts, Brent Donnellan, and Sanjay Srivastava
We P editors were curious about this new blogging trend, so we contacted a few personality science bloggers—Brent Roberts of PIG-IE, Brent Donnellan of The Trait-State Continuum, and Sanjay Srivastava of The Hardest Science—and asked them some of our burning questions about why and how they blog. If you’re a fan of their blogs, you’ll want to check out ARP’s new Personality Meta-Blog, which aggregates blogs about personality science. And if you have a blog that you’d like the meta-blog to add, let us know by emailing personalitymetablog@gmail.com.
P: What got you started blogging?
Roberts: Daryl Bem. Well, really Daryl Bem and our reading group: Personality Interest Group—Including Espresso (PIG-IE). I started a web site for PIG-IE to make it easier to distribute readings and in the hope that interested parties would comment on readings and speakers.1 We read a preprint of Bem’s now infamous ESP JPSP article and had a rather stimulating discussion. In fact, like most of social and personality psychologists on the topic of Bem’s paper, we had several stimulating discussions. What got caught in my craw and finally pushed me into the “blogging” role was the fact that our discussion did not center on how embarrassing it was for JPSP to publish a paper on ESP or how crazy the editors must have been. No, our group had come to the conclusion that the paper was a tour de force of typical methods in social and personality psychology. The editors had no choice but to accept Bem’s article because to reject Bem’s ESP paper would be to reject, well, all JPSP papers. There was a clear sense of “mission control, we’ve got a problem” in the PIG-IE group that was not being articulated in any of the discussions we were privy to.
So, one of the first true blog posts for the PIG-IE site was our vain attempt at a clarion call for change. This first post is a great lesson in blog posting. That is, if no one follows your blog, no one reads your posts. No one read our post. So, 9 months later I reposted it as a piece in last year’s edition of P. Then, people read it. Blogging is a great way of assessing your lack of relevance.
Donnellan: This is kind of embarrassing to admit. My blog was an outgrowth of a post-tenure malaise that was partially stimulated by the recent methodological issues and events of 2011 to the present.2
I knew that used to be excited about research and even inspired by the process of asking questions and analyzing data. This motivation and sense of excitement were fading as I became more cynical about the field. Perhaps such changes are a natural consequence of maturation. However, I felt I needed to do a few new things to feel productive and to get my career on a track that can sustain me for the next 25 years. Blogging was one of those things.
I thought writing an occasional blog entry would force me to express some ideas that I happen to think are interesting. The whole thing is admittedly solipsistic but I usually find the process of writing an entry energizing.
Srivastava: I think what got me started was reading academic blogs that I found interesting, and realizing that they were speaking to a gap in academic discourse. Traditionally, there were journals where everything was peer reviewed and high-stakes and slow, and there were informal and often private conversations that took place over email or in hotel bars at conferences. But there was nothing in between. And I realized that from time to time I had things I wanted to express in that middle ground. So in early 2009 I got a WordPress account and started putting stuff up there. At first I didn’t tell anybody—put up a handful of posts and had zero readers, because I was just trying to decide if this was something I really wanted to do, and I wanted to see how my writing would come out if I wasn’t worried about who would see it. After I got over my hang-ups, I think I posted a link on Facebook to see how my friends would react to a post—and then the cat was out of the bag.
P: What blogs do you read regularly, and what do you get out of reading them?
Roberts: I read blogs like I read research literature. I’m very utilitarian. If it is interesting or relevant to what I am currently doing, I read it. Therefore, I don’t read blogs regularly, but rely on smart, motivated colleagues, like Sanjay Srivastava and Brent Donnellan to point out what blogs I should read.
Donnellan: I like reading Sanjay’s blog and the entries by Brent and the crew at UIUC. I also like the Language Log and blogs by Andrew Gelman and Robert Kurzban. I think Nate Silver’s blog is great.
I occasionally learn about papers from reading blog entries. Mostly, however, I try to get excited about ideas and research. I see reading blogs as kind of a warm-up lap before doing my own work.
Srivastava: I enjoy reading Andrew Gelman’s blog, which covers some topics I’m interested in (like multilevel modeling and causal inference) in a way that’s both informative and good reading. Gelman also contributes to The Monkey Cage, which is a pretty amazing bridge between academic political science and public political discourse and which I think could be a model for other fields.
Tal Yarkoni is also a very smart guy with an insightful and often funny take on a lot of things – for example, after Daryl Bem’s Psi paper came out he wrote a terrific analysis that anticipated so much of what’s been in our field’s discussion of false positives and replicability for the last 2 years.
Cedar’s Digest by Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham’s blog are also both great blogs. And of courses the Brents— Brent Donnellan’s Trait-State Continuum, and Brent Roberts’s PIG-IE blog.
P: Why blog? What is unique about blogging? What's appealing about that format in particular? Who should blog (and who shouldn't)?
Roberts: You blog because you have something to say. Blogging is unique from our typical publications because there is no oversight. I refer to it as “poorly edited, non-peer reviewed, periodic bloviating.” That is exactly why it is appealing. There is no oversight. If you have something to say, then blog away. That said, don’t be surprised or upset if no one reads it.
Donnellan: I like having an outlet for writing quick reflections about research and research methods. It is also nice to have a little space to grind the axes I want to grind (e.g., small sample sizes in papers published in Psychological Science). I write the vast majority of my papers and chapters with co-authors so it is liberating to have a forum where I can be as nasty (or as nice) as I want to be. So Brent’s take about the lack of oversight is definitely one of the appealing things about blogging. I also like the immediacy of getting something off of my chest and then being done with it. So much of what we do in this job involves sizable time lags. We submit papers and proposals and then wait months for feedback. At that point, we have to respond or process the rejection. Blogging is a refreshing change of pace from that pattern.
Besides the lack of oversight and the immediacy, I think the possibility of a give- and- take in the form of comments is appealing. There is the potential for learning something new. This is actually rare in practice (at least in my limited experience) but that possibility is exciting.
I think anyone should blog who wants to do it. But there are consequences that come from the freedom and immediacy of blogging. There have been a few times when I worried that I crossed one of those unwritten lines. However, I ultimately subscribe to the romantic ideal that one figures out the location of boundaries by occasionally crossing them. Plus, few people read my blog anyways!
Indeed, I do not think anyone who does this should expect a big audience. Having regular readers is not a primary concern of mine— I started doing this so I will not end up muttering to myself on the streets of East Lansing in a few years. Truth be told, I still worry this will happen anyways.
Srivastava: As I mentioned above, I think traditional forms of academic discourse leave a lot of gaps. Journals are slow, high-stakes, and heavily filtered by the peer review process— sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And pretty much everything else in the traditional realm is private (things like anonymous peer reviews or informal conversations). Blogging lets you react to things quickly, it lets you write shorter and less formal pieces, it lets you take risks, and it lets you write for a variety of purposes— like to express personal opinions, to share critiques, to ask questions, or to respond to current events.
I hope more academic psychologists start experimenting with blogging, and especially with blogging for each other. There are plenty of blogs where psychologists speak to the general public— Psychology Today has a huge number of blogs like that. But I would like to see us use blogs more to engage with one another— to share criticisms, insights, ideas about where the field needs to go.
P: How do you decide what to blog about? How do you decide if/when to censor yourself?
Roberts: I’ve taken to using blogs for materials that would normally not be written about in scientific outlets that pertain to how our guild and/or science works—the unwritten rules of our little enterprise. I’ve always perceived that this information—what we are looking for in grad students, how we actually conduct science, tips for writing—to be incredibly important for success, but to be hidden from the broader audience because it was something discussed in lab meetings or whispered in the back of the room at conferences. I see blogging on these topics as a way of democratizing our institutional knowledge so that more people can benefit from it. I also see some of the unwritten rules as our Achilles heel (e.g., poor research methods).
Donnellan: I try to pick topics that relate to my own research interests but would not normally fit into a conventional paper. Sometimes I just want to express some disdain about an underpowered study or rant about something stupid. Other times I want to think more carefully about a methodological issue. I am still working on the whole self-censorship thing.
Srivastava: I decided early on that I was not going to try to create some kind of mission statement or goal for what I’d blog about or how often I’d blog. And I have stuck with that. I guess you could say I blog from the gut— I just write blog posts when I have the impulse to. It comes and goes— sometimes I’ll fire off a post a day for several days, other times I might go a month between posts.
I don’t think I have ever censored myself per se, but sometimes it is a challenge to write in the short and informal format of a blog while satisfying my inner perfectionist that wants every idea to be worked over thoroughly. So if I feel like I have gone too far in one direction or the other, I might set a draft aside without posting it.
Over time, I think I have gravitated toward writing about a lot of inside-baseball things related to how our field works— things like research methods, professional practice, and ethics. I wrote a post on how to get through an academic job interview that has gotten a lot of hits. I have also occasionally written on research that I have found interesting and that I thought more people should know about— things like the Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) review of learning styles research, or James Heckman’s research on early childhood interventions and personality change.
The all-time most popular post on my site, though, is a guest post written by Brent Roberts titled What the Heck is Research Anyway? It started as a letter he wrote to a family member explaining what he does for a living. I put it up right before Christmas break, and it went kind of viral— I think a lot of academics posted it on their Facebook pages and asked family members to please read it.
P: Who is your audience?
Roberts: Mostly other scientists, but it could be anyone. For example, one of my most “successful”3 blog posts was actually a letter I wrote to my extended family about what research is. Humorously, my family was entirely indifferent to it. The broader community of researchers and families seemed to like it, though I suspect it was mostly other researchers feeling some small amount of validation from the content therein.
That is another cautionary tale about blogging. Successful blogging is a bit like news channels like Fox and MSNBC. You tend to be most successful when screaming loudly into the echo chamber.
Donnellan: Me!?! But I also hope other researchers with similar interests and viewpoints occasionally read my blog. I would even like some constructive pushback from parties with different perspectives.
P: How do you think blogging could/will change our field?
Roberts: I don’t think it will change much. Currently, blogs seem to come in three types: Rants, news feeds, and attempts at education. Rants are great because they let people rip on the system, but they do little more than provide a venue for venting one’s spleen. News feeds are great for keeping up with science or rants. Attempts at education are great, but won’t revolutionize our science.
We still establish status through formal, peer- reviewed publications and I can’t see that institution being replaced with everyone’s personal blog. That said, I’d love to see personality psychology move to a more open system like arxiv.org where all papers are uploaded and available, peer reviewed, post-peer reviewed, and eventually anointed with formal publication when they have been deemed good enough by the masses of scholars associated with those respective guilds and journals. It is a much more democratic process than we currently use. If blogging moves us in that direction, then huzzah!
Donnellan: I do not think blogging will replace traditional peer review or any of the other practices and rituals of our field. However, I hope that blogging makes post-publication more common and more public. Marcus and Oransky (2011) made the point that the published paper is not sacred (these individuals started the Retraction Watch site). I agree and I think the field needs to do a better job of taking this mantra seriously.
So I think blogging could improve our science if it is used to provide a more visible and active post-publication review. The possibility of some back and forth between authors and critics might even generate something constructive for the field. If this kind of thing happened more regularly, then science journalists could wait to see what happens with post-publication review before covering a paper. They might even be able to cover the post-publication review in their articles for the general public. Thus, if I want to be a total idealist, blogs could make healthy scientific skepticism and the constructive criticism of research more transparent. I think that would benefit the public and the field.
Srivastava: I think it is already starting to. Quite a lot of the recent conversation about fraud, questionable research practices, replicability, etc. has taken place on blogs. Journal articles have been part of that too, but we cannot rely on something that slow and that filtered as our only way of communicating about these issues. So I think blogs have a great deal of promise in helping us make our science better.
I also hope more people use blogs as a way to comment and critique each other’s work. I have never believed that single studies are definitive about anything, but highly selective journals create a big incentive for people to sell their studies’ strengths and cover up their weaknesses. We need a place where people can probe each others’ ideas, disagree with each other constructively, and hash things out. There is a lot of talk about post-publication peer review as a new development in science discourse. Maybe some day that will be better integrated into our journals, but in the meantime there is nothing stopping anybody from getting a free blog account and sharing their thoughts with the world.
1 The latter has been an outright failure. No-one really wants to comment on a paper or speaker in a public forum, especially students.
2 For example, the publication of the infamous Bem paper, the increased attention to researcher degrees of freedom, the uncovering of a few fraudsters, and the recognition that magic seems to be in play when considering many of the multi-study packages that appear in our flagship journals.
3 Success in this case meaning more than 10 people read it.