We bid Steve Lewandowsky a fond farewell as the very first Psychonomic Society Digital Content Editor. But fear not, friends, he is now on the Governing Board and has an open invitation to contribute to the digital content.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve about his tenure as the Digital Content Editor. In the interview, he reflects on his experience, gives tips to members of the society about getting the most from the Society’s digital team, and gives tips to me as the new Digital Content Editor. You won’t want to miss two classic stories he tells (one starting 7:36 in and the other starting 8:55 in). See below for the podcast and transcribed interview.
Transcription:
Mickes: I’m Laura Mickes, the Psychonomic Society’s new Digital Content Editor, and I’m interviewing Professor Steve Lewandowsky. Before Steve settles into his role on the Society’s Governing Board, he graciously agreed to be interviewed about his time as the first and previous Digital Content Editor for the Psychonomic Society. Thank you so much, Steve.
Lewandowsky: Thanks, Laura.
Mickes: So happy you agreed to do this. I’m just going to ask you a handful of questions. I want to learn all about your time as the Editor. We’re going to start with the beginning. First, I want to know – how did the feature content begin?
Lewandowsky: The Society decided that they wanted to enter the sort of blogosphere and a social media and public engagement about five, six years ago or something like that. So, there was a public call for applications for this position and I applied and at the time, this was probably in 2014 maybe 2015 I already had considerable blogging experience. I ran my own blog. I had been on Twitter for a while. I published a few papers about things that happened on blogs. I had written, you know, 30 or so op-eds, opinion pieces, for the media. So I was sort of, you know, I had a little bit of experience at the time and I applied and I got the job.
Mickes: You’ve been doing this for five years?
Lewandowsky: I think it’s been five years. Yes. Yes.
Mickes: That was my question. How did you become the Editor? Probably easily. Was there any competition at all?
Lewandowsky: Well, I don’t know if there was competition, but I did have to write an application and then sort of outline what I was going to do and, like any other editor’s position. And then, um, yeah, I, I got the job and I’m, you know, in retrospect, very happy that I did it, that I got the job and I did it because it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done.
Mickes: Really?
Lewandowsky: Yeah. It was fantastic. I mean, it was a lot of work, but all of it, pretty much all of it was, was enjoyable. Just having ideas, being able to design a whole new platform online and something that’s dedicated to science. But at the same time, you have the freedom to kind of write things that are entertaining and appealing and you can put in videos and clips, um, newspaper clips and all that kind of stuff, which I really enjoy.
Mickes: Back up a little bit for members who aren’t so familiar with what you did as the Editor. How would you sum up the job?
Lewandowsky: Well, basically you’re curating online content and we now have something like 300 possibly 400 posts that have accumulated over the last five years. I know I wrote 220 of them and I think you probably can almost double that with the posts written by other team members because that was one of the enjoyable things for me was to build a team of Digital Associate Editors who contributed to the, to the writing and who still do. And we’ve had considerable turnover. So the team we have now is nothing like the team we started out with, but all the people who volunteered to become part of the team were just fantastic to work with. And so that’s one of the things that that we did was to expose a lot of junior faculty members, even PhD students, to public engagement, and I as Content Editor was editing all of their posts before they went up wo they were engaged in some learning, I hope, as well through the, through the feedback I provided. And it was just fun to put together a lot of different ideas for content.
Mickes: Is that the best experience?
Lewandowsky: I think the best, oh, it’s hard to… Look, the best experience was just doing the, doing the job and all of its manifestations. I tell you there was one thing I didn’t like and that is that early on we had a lot of technical issues because we went from one platform to the next to another one and it was only about three years ago that we stabilized and we’re now running WordPress, which will be around forever, which is fully configurable and customizable. So it looks like the remainder of the Psychonomics website, but it is actually run through WordPress. And once we settled into that, everything was pretty much smooth sailing and that’s when I was able to focus entirely on content rather than dealing with, you know, bugs or technical issues and silly things like that, which, which took up an annoying amount of time early on. But that’s just a startup cost that you have to incur. Other than that, all of it was great. I mean, I enjoyed writing posts. Uh, I enjoyed publishing other people’s stuff. I enjoyed the digital events that we’ve had, which are week-long series of posts – day by day, Monday through Friday. Sometimes we even went for two weeks discussing contemporary issues.
Mickes: Do you have a favorite digital event?
Lewandowsky: Yeah, I’ve had a few. We did one on diversity and inclusion, which I thought was really good. I think that was last year and we got the diversity and inclusion committee involved. We reached out to women and minorities and discussed aspects of the problems they are facing. Yeah, that was, that was really cool. And that attracted a lot of, a lot of readers. It was one of our most read digital events with, you know, … I don’t remember now, but multiple thousands of viewers and given that the Society only has 3- or 4,000 members, maybe if I’m right, you know, our readership for some of those events was up to half, I think, of our membership. So, uh, which was pretty good. And then we had another digital event on preregistration that also caused a lot of discussion judging by what went on on Twitter. People were debating that quite a bit. We had another one on big data recently that I thought was really cool. So we’ve had a, I don’t know, over the years, maybe a dozen or so of these … and we did about two or three of those a year and they were a lot of fun but also took a lot of time to organize.
Mickes: Yes. Uh oh. Okay. [nervous laughter]
Lewandowsky: Yes, brace yourself.
Mickes: Oh God. [nervous laughter] Right. [nervous laughter] I’ll brace myself.
Mickes: This is a memory question … you’ve written 228 posts,
Lewandowsky: something like that,
Mickes: over the years. What’s the most memorable paper?
Lewandowsky: Oh God.
Mickes: I know. Is that terrible?
Lewandowsky: No, I mean, that’s a very good question. The rather embarrassing answer is that I remember the titles more than the papers because I always had a lot of fun making up the titles for my posts. And I remember writing one that was called from zero to mayhem in eight seconds and, and the opening clip was a start of a grand prix somewhere. And these race cars pile up eight seconds later and that had a lot to do with the contents of the paper. But [laughing] I cannot recall what it was.
Mickes: All right, I’ll have to read that one. I don’t know if I’ve read it.
Mickes: Okay. Now another question I don’t know if you’ll be happy to answer, but can you tell us what the most embarrassing thing is?
Lewandowsky: Well, the most embarrassing, embarrassing thing happened before I published a post. Thank God. Um, because I was looking for a video clip to illustrate something about music or whatever in this article. And so I went on YouTube and I typed in some search string and up pops this video and I think, oh yeah, that’s kinda cool, you know, and I embedded in the post and I was about to publish it. And then I thought, well maybe I should listen to the whole video, not just the first 10 seconds. So I did and thank God I did.
Mickes: [nervous laughing] What? I’m dying. What?
Lewandowsky: Well, it turned into something that I think a lot of people would have found offensive after the opening few seconds because that’s when the clothes came off,
Mickes: [laughing] Oh no!
Lewandowsky: and yes. It was on YouTube, so it wasn’t like something from the nether regions of the internet. But it was, I’m glad I watched the whole video.
Mickes: That’s, that is a good lesson for me.
Lewandowsky: Yes. Don’t just take the first 10 seconds of a video on YouTube to tell you what the remaining 90 seconds,
Mickes: [laughing] big trouble … I thought you were going to tell me something else.
Lewandowsky: [pause] Tell me what I should tell you.
Mickes: [laughing] I thought you were going to talk about the time you were tweeting.
Lewandowsky: Oh gosh, yes, [laughing] yes. Well case in point, that’s when I didn’t catch it until afterwards. Yes. And the lesson here is do not use more than one Twitter account on your iPhone app because you can very easily get confused and lose track of what you’re tweeting.
Lewandowsky: So I spent a whole train ride from London back to Bristol one evening tweeting about my political views relating to Brexit. Now what I didn’t realize was that the whole time it was the Psychonomics account that was in my app, not in my own personal account. And then somebody pointed out on Twitter the next day, I think was … well, the person shall remain nameless, but they are now a colleague on the governing board and said, I didn’t know the Psychonomic Society took such a strong stance on Brexit. And, oh my God. So I went back and deleted a lot of tweets, but of course, yes. And then I uninstalled the Psychonomics account on the app.
Mickes: That’s a good idea. [laughing]
Lewandowsky: So, I undertook steps to keep that under control.
Mickes: Did you send out an apology tweet?
Lewandowsky: No, I didn’t. I thought unless people challenged me on this further and I’ll just quietly make it disappear and pretend it never happened. But now it’s a funny story.
Mickes: That’s a great story, I love it.
Mickes: I have one more question and that is what would you tell the Psychonomic members, um, so that they can get the most out of what the digital team can offer?
Lewandowsky: Yes, excellent question. Well, a number of things. First of all, participate by submitting articles that get published in Psychonomic journals for potential publication that’s a blog post, number one. Number two, once they are up there, discuss them on Twitter or in the comment feature of our posts. And most importantly, make use of our teaching feature because we had a facility online where you can basically select any number of blog posts to which you can find through our search facility and keywords. All the posts have keywords tagged to them, so you can get all the information on working memory, on the Stroop effect, or whatever it is you want.
Lewandowsky: You can then choose posts that might be suitable for your students to read and put them together in some sort of a mini syllabus and we will put that syllabus up there to give you access, or give your students access, to a personalized section that has your course name and number on there and then a link to all the posts. And we’ve done this now for two years. We’ve had some uptake of that and the feedback we’ve got has been very positive. The students love it because it gives them an easy way into the scientific content by first reading a post, then get them into the article, which they might otherwise find to be quite daunting.
Mickes: can’t understand
Lewandowsky: Exactly, if they’re first year students. So that to me is probably the best thing you can do for everybody involved for the students, members of the Society, for yourself as an academic, make use of our content for teaching.
Mickes: Is there anything you want to mention?
Lewandowsky: No, I just hope you’re going to have as much fun as I did.
Mickes: Oh, me too. [laughter] I’m scared about writing 228 posts. [nervous laughter]
Lewandowsky: Well, it took five years, so,
Mickes: Okay!
Mickes: Thanks so much, Steve.
Lewandowsky: Okay, thank you.
