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, […]
Scientific Practice
If you had to bet on a psychological effect replicating, what effect would you bet on? Though it seems like an unlikely bet to be asked to make, it’s a reality for anyone conducting a psychology class demo. You want an effect that holds up no matter who your students are. You don’t want an […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When we teach our first-year Psychology students about the “history of Psychology”, they usually get to see at least one slide that shows a “black box”. “This black box” – we tend to say – “is what Behaviorists like Watson and Skinner wanted to keep unopened, since all they were interested in was the relationship […]
There are no statistics that inflame the passions of statisticians and scientists as does the p value. The p value is, informally, a statistic used for assessing whether a “null hypothesis” (e.g., that the difference in performance between two conditions is 0) should be taken seriously. It is simultaneously the most used and most hated statistic in all of […]
Since the enlightenment, openness has been a core part of the ethos of science. Scientific openness takes many forms: from its inception the Royal Society, for instance, published reports from all over the world, not just Great Britain. Science is politically open, a collective search for truth and human well-being ideally not concerned with national […]