Scientific Practice

To deceive or not to deceive: Influence of deception suspicion on behavioral patterns

Kim and Drew want to go out for the evening. Kim wants to attend a symphonic orchestra, but Drew wants to attend a gymnastics competition. While they do not agree on what event to attend, both prefer to do something together rather than alone. The situation constitutes an example of an experimental game, a set […]

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Psychonomic Society Statistical Guidelines (Updated)

The following guidelines were adopted in 2012 and were updated in 2019 by Alexander Etz, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Richard Morey. The guidelines have a permanent home here, but they are provided as a blogpost here to enable interested members to comment.  The Psychonomic Society’s Publications Committee and Ethics Committee and the Editors-in-Chief of the Society’s […]

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The revolution will not be alphabetized: Alphabetizing in-text citations biases citation rates

Imagine a world in which Einstein crafted his general theory of relativity – discovering and codifying the laws that govern light, space, and time – then went about his life, never publishing, and never telling another person. It may seem obvious, but scientific knowledge, in order to influence the generation of future scientific knowledge or […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: Providing a permanent home for the discussion

The last two weeks leading up to the international meeting in Amsterdam (more on that soon) were taken up with a series of posts that discussed issues surrounding diversity and inclusion in the Psychonomic Society and in science generally. This #PSDiversityandInclusion digital event was our largest to date with 8 posts spread over two weeks, […]

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NIH, clinical trials, and the Psychonomic Society: A comment from the chair of the governing board

Although I typically do not submit grants to NIH, I recently was perusing their Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) to find out if any would align with my educationally relevant research.  The great news is that I found some promising announcements, but the “Clinical Trial Not Allowed” warning made me flash back to NIH’s recent decision […]

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The NIH definition of clinical trials: An update for the holiday season

As many of you know, the NIH has broadened its definition of “clinical trials” in a manner that looks like it will include a lot of basic human behavioral and brain sciences that would not normally be included in the conventional definition of a clinical trial. I have outlined this issue in two previous posts […]

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The NIH Clinical Trials Issue (continued): A good try but we still have a problem

The NIH has posted a new version of Case 18. If that sentence means nothing to you, you might want to visit my post from last week, “Basic research can be open and transparent without being a clinical trial” in which I summarized the problem with the NIH’s plan to label much of human behavioral […]

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Basic research can be open and transparent without being a clinical trial

I would not classify most of my experiments as clinical trials, but now, under NIH rules that become effective in 2018, much of my work along with a significant portion of basic human behavioral research will be classified as clinical trials. This change is motivated by worthy goals but, in its current form, it has […]

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Catching the same fish twice: How wide is the MTurk net?

I sometimes use MTurk for running experiments. As an old-timer, there is something of a magical quality to MTurk. You post your study and only a few hours later you receive data from perhaps one thousand or so people. I can remember when we used to meet the people participating in our studies face-to-face, with […]

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