Author Archives: Simine Vazire

i wanted to write a series of blog posts featuring a few of the people i've met who are challenging the conventional wisdom and inspiring others.  but instead of telling you what i think of them, i wanted to give them a chance to share their insights in their own words.  i contacted a few early career researchers i've had the chance to get to know who have impressed me, and who are not affiliated with me or my lab (though i am collaborating on group projects with some of them).  there are many more role models than those featured here, and i encourage you to join me in amplifying them and their messages, however you can. i asked each of these people "what are the blind spots in your field - what issues should we be tackling that we aren't paying enough attention to?"  here are their answers, in three parts, which i will post in three separate blog posts this week. find part i of the series here (with a longer introduction) find part ii of the series here   Part 3: Jackie Thompson, Joe Hilgard, Sophia Crüwell Jackie Thompson To me, failures of communication are the biggest blind spot in science. Continue reading →

i wanted to write a series of blog posts featuring a few of the people i've met who are challenging the conventional wisdom and inspiring others.  but instead of telling you what i think of them, i wanted to give them a chance to share their insights in their own words.  i contacted a few early career researchers i've had the chance to get to know who have impressed me, and who are not affiliated with me or my lab (though i am collaborating on group projects with some of them).  there are many more role models than those featured here, and i encourage you to join me in amplifying them and their messages, however you can. i asked each of these people "what are the blind spots in your field - what issues should we be tackling that we aren't paying enough attention to?"  here are their answers, in three parts, which i will post in three separate blog posts this week. find part i of the series here (with a longer introduction) Part II: Emma Henderson, Anne Israel, Ruben Arslan, and Hannah Moshontz Emma Henderson I feel safer than most to embrace open research because I’m not set on staying in academia. However my lack of trepidation is not the case for most ECRs: There’s a constant background radiation of work-based anxiety amongst those researchers who would, in an ideal world, be uncompromisingly bold in their choices. But they’re hampered by a “publish or perish” culture and a lack of sustainability and security in their jobs (if they have jobs in the first place). Continue reading →

tired of lionization

"she's too old for breaking and too young to tame" -kris kistofferson, from the song sister sinead

the older i get the less i understand reverence of authority or eminence.  when i was a student, i assumed that those who rose to eminence must have some special wisdom - they often acted as if they did, and others seemed to hang on their every word, so i gave them the benefit of the doubt even if i couldn't see it.  now i'm pretty convinced that there's nothing to this.  some eminent people are wise, and some are full of shit.  just like everyone else. there are so many messages out there reinforcing the idea that high status people have so much wisdom to offer.  every time a conference stops all parallel programming for a famous person's keynote, every special issue with only invited submissions by senior people sharing their wisdom, every collection of intellectual leaders' opinions on random questions at The Edge - they all send this message. it's not that eminent people never have useful advice to give, or important experiences we can all learn from.  it's just that we should judge this on a case by case basis, rather than assuming it.  the knee-jerk assumption that eminent people should be listened to, detached from the actual value of what they're saying, is the problem.  if eminent people are just using their eminence to reinforce existing incentives and hierarchies (even if they do so in ways that seem benevolent and generous), rather than challenging them, then maybe we should listen to them less. Continue reading →

  [for flip yourself - part i see here] we’ve recently seen a big push to make the scientific process more transparent. bringing this process out in the open can bring out the best in everyone – when we know our work will be seen by others, we’re more careful.  when others know they can check the work, they trust us more.  most of our focus has been on bringing transparency to how the research is done, but we also need transparency about how it’s evaluated – peer review has become a core part of the scientific process, and of how scientific claims get their credibility.  but peer review is far from transparent and accountable. we can help bring more transparency and accountability to peer review by ‘flipping’ ourselves.  just like journals can flip from closed (behind a paywall) to open (open access), we can flip our reviews by spending more of our time doing reviews that everyone can see. one way we can do this is through journals that offer open review, but we don’t need to limit ourselves to that.  thanks to preprint servers like PsyArXiv, authors can post manuscripts that anyone can access, and get feedback from anyone who takes the time to read and comment on their papers.  best of all, if the feedback is posted directly on the preprint (using a tool like hypothes. Continue reading →

a bison who recently finished her editorial term.

my mom asked me a few months ago what i was going to do once i was no longer editor in chief of a journal.  she was worried about my well-being.  “you love being an editor,” she said.  when i told her i didn’t know, she said “could you just keep reading other people’s papers and sending them your comments?” it’s not the first time my mom’s innocent suggestion, preposterous on its face, turned out to be the answer. in high school when i wanted to quit the basketball team but both of us still wanted me to have an after school sport, my mom suggested i join the wrestling team.  after laughing at her for a day or two, i realized it was the perfect solution.  there are perks to having unconventional parents.* for the last few months i’ve been thinking about what i’ve learned from being an editor, what i loved about it, and what i didn’t love about it.  i loved the day to day work.  the intellectual challenge, and the challenge of using my power for good. Continue reading →

i recently applied for the editor in chief position at Psychological Science.  i didn't get it, but i got far enough to be asked to write a vision statement, responding to eight prompts.  it was a fun exercise to think about what i would've liked to do had i been editor in chief of Psych Science, so i thought i'd share my vision statement here.  one of the main reasons i was very interested in this position is because Eric Eich and Steve Lindsay have done a great job, as editors in chief, of making the journal more and more credible as a source for interesting and rigorous psychological science.  i hope the journal keeps moving in this direction. this version has been lightly edited to fix some, but surely not all, typos. (in my defense, Srivastava is hard to spell.)  

VISION STATEMENT

1. Overall Vision

What would be your overall vision for the journal? Continue reading →

[DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in my posts are personal opinions, and they do not reflect the editorial policy of Social Psychological and Personality Science or its sponsoring associations, which are responsible for setting editorial policy for the journal.]

happy halloween

here's an argument i've heard against registered reports and results-blind reviewing: "judging studies based on their methods is like judging a baking contest based on the recipes."  the implication being that this would be ridiculous.

i've been thinking a lot about this analogy and i love it.  not because i agree with it, but because i think it gets at the crux of the disagreement about the value of negative (null) results.  it's about whether we think the value of a study comes from its results or its methods.

the baking contest analogy rests on the assumption that the goal of science is to produce the best-tasting results.  according to this logic, the more we can produce delicious, mouth-watering results, the better we're doing.  accumulating knowledge is like putting together a display case of exquisite desserts.  and being able to produce a delicious result is itself evidence that your methods are good.  we know a good study when we see a juicy result.  after all, you wouldn't be able to produce a delicious cake if your recipe was crap.

this analogy probably sounds reasonable in part because of how we talk about negative results - as failures.  in baking that's probably apt - i don't want to eat your failed donut.*  but in science, the negative result might be the accurate one - you can't judge the truthiness of the result from the taste it leaves in your mouth. Continue reading →

[DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in my posts are personal opinions, and they do not reflect the editorial policy of Social Psychological and Personality Science or its sponsoring associations, which are responsible for setting editorial policy for the journal.]

hello

i'm reading a book called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about Russia, and the name keeps haunting me (the content of the book is good, too).  sometimes i worry that this goes for science, too.  it's not just that when nothing is true, everything is possible.  but when everything is possible, nothing is true. sometimes studying human behavior is so wild and messy that it feels like anything goes.  we create ad hoc scales more often than we probably should, and we invent manipulations out of thin air, rarely pausing to validate them.  if the best we can do is a college student sample, that sin will be forgiven.  if we can't get a behavioral measure of a behavior, a self-report will often do.  we do what's possible because, well, what's the alternative? i'm here to consider the exceedingly unpopular view that the alternative - to do nothing - is sometimes preferable to doing what's possible. Continue reading →

 [DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in my posts are personal opinions, and they do not reflect the editorial policy of Social Psychological and Personality Science or its sponsoring associations, which are responsible for setting editorial policy for the journal.]  

carrots

if you had told me five years ago that even one in twenty social/personality psych papers would provide links to their data and code, or to a pre-registration, i would have thought that would be huge progress.**   i've long been a fan of the nudges that encourage these kinds of practices (e.g., badges), and until recently i thought going as far as to require this kind of transparency (even with room for legitimate exceptions) was probably unrealistic - our field didn't seem ready for that.   i was sympathetic to the carrots-not-sticks approach.

but there's a problem with carrots-not-sticks.   we're asking researchers to eat the carrots, but some of the carrots are pretty bitter.   sometimes, when researchers are transparent, that brings information to light that undermines their claims, and readers don't buy the claims.   that's a necessary side effect of transparency.   and it means we can't in good faith tell researchers that transparency is always in their best interest and will be its own reward.   we can't lure people with carrots, and pretend all of the carrots are delicious and fun to eat. Continue reading →

[DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in my posts are personal opinions, and they do not reflect the editorial policy of Social Psychological and Personality Science or its sponsoring associations, which are responsible for setting editorial policy for the journal.]

i've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a scientist.  being a scientist comes with certain obligations, and ignoring those obligations can give science a bad name.  it seems to me we could do more to make scientists aware of this responsibility when they decide whether or not to join the profession.

our most important obligation as scientists, to my mind, is preserving science's credibility. that doesn't mean we can't make mistakes, but above all else, we should be committed to opening ourselves up to scrutiny and correcting our errors.

to make these values a bit more concrete, i tried to adapt the hippocratic oath to scientists. you can tell how solemn this oath is by the use of capitalization.

the values i tried to capture were inspired by Merton's norms, but in the spirit of Merton's norm of universalism, i refrained from naming the oath after him (or anyone). it is very far from comprehensive, and i know it's cheesy, but i ask you, dear reader: if you can't engage in a little facile sentimentality on new year's day, when can you? Continue reading →