The Personality Meta-Blog

[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 →