Men take shortcuts, women may follow the Zhuangzi: Sex differences in navigation

Search for “can women read maps?” and Google will reward you with more than 300,000,000 hits. I haven’t read them all but the first few hits are pretty clear in their verdict, namely that women cannot read maps. And the book, “Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps” is likely at the top […]

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#psAmsterdam18: A retrospective on the meeting and expert opinions

The International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Amsterdam wrapped up on Saturday (12 May). The meeting was attended by around 700 delegates and featured keynote addresses by John Wixted and Dedre Gentner. Some photos of the meeting are available on the Society’s website. The meeting also featured 7 symposia: Tackling the Confidence Crisis with […]

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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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#PSDiversityandInclusion: “Congrats, you have an all male panel!”

Academics by and large — at least, in my experience — strongly endorse norms of gender equality. The Psychonomic Society in particular has adopted a statement endorsing diversity and inclusion, which includes the explicit goal of “[w]ork[ing] towards strong representation in all aspects of the Society…that are not only gender balanced, but includes underrepresented groups.” […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: “I would like to address the cultural bias in scientific research”

Even before I began my studies in psychology back in 2006, I have always been intrigued by the scientific research findings in the behavioral sciences. Back then I did not pay much attention to the sample characteristics on which those findings were based. Things changed when I had to write my bachelor and master’s theses, […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: How can we increase the representation of women at senior levels in Psychology?

One ongoing challenge for science concerns the poor representation of women in senior positions.  Women are underrepresented at full professor level in virtually all areas of science, in the USA, Europe, Canada—as we learned yesterday during this digital event—and around the world. The field of Psychology presents a particularly striking example of this disparity.  Students […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: Repairing the ruptured pipeline—the case of Canada

(This post was co-authored with Debra Titone) In most of today’s Psychology undergraduate classes, the majority of students are women. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that many women are entering the “pipeline” to academic careers in psychology. Yet, as others have repeatedly documented, women are in the minority with respect to positions of leadership […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: Rigour, Replication, Reputation … and Gender

Although issues relating to replication and open science have received a great deal of recent attention, relatively little discussion has been devoted to how these issues intersect with considerations of diversity and inclusion.  In an earlier post, I argued that one reason that diversity is valuable in science is because it can introduce diversity of […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: De-WEIRDing our participant samples

It has been pointed out that the scientific literature on human cognition and behavior is based primarily on data from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. This situation is unlikely to change, given that most researchers do not have the training or the funding necessary to study non-WEIRD populations. In addition, some researchers […]

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#PSD&I Beyond Tokenism: Embracing Racial Diversity In Teaching Psychology  

(This post was co-authored with Almas Talib) Over the last ten years, many British universities have increased their efforts to attract Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students. But seduced by the idea that fair access to higher education would automatically translate into equal opportunities, only some institutions have followed-up on their BME students’ progression rates […]

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