December
12/31 Baby Math: The Numbers Do Not Add Up
“I show that meta-analysis underestimate the presence of publication bias because effect coding often introduces non-significant results that are not the focal result in published articles. After taking publication bias into account there is no evidence that infants can do simple addition or subtraction tasks.”
12/29 Did Social Psychologists Change their Research Practice: A Case Study (Mickey Inzlicht)
“Compares z-curve from before 2012 to z-curve from 2013-2018”
12/28 Did Social Psychologists Change their Research Practice: A Case Study (Adam D. Galinsky)
“Compares z-curve from before 2012 to z-curve from 2013-2018”
12/22 Francis’s Audit of Multiple-Study Articles in Psychological Science in 2009-2012
“A neglected article by Greg Francis showed that most multiple-study articles in Psychological Science from 2009-2012 showed evidence that questionable practices were used. Here I present a z-curve analysis of these studies that confirms his findings.”
12/20 When DataColada kissed Fiske’s ass to publish in Annual Review of Psychology
“The DataColada team (Uri Simonsohn, Leaf Nelson, Joe Simmons) make the claim that nobody suppressed failed studies and everybody used ‘honest p-hacking’ to get significant results. This contradicts John et al.’s (2012) findings.”
12/18 Statistics Wars: Don’t change alpha. Change the null-hypothesis!
“I argue that one problem with NHST is the point-null-hypothesis (nil-hypothesis). I argue that we can retrofit published studies and use published studies to test a range-null-hypothesis that makes it possible to provide evidence for it.”
12/14 Bayes-Factors in Favor of the Nil-Hypothesis are Meaningless
“I agree with the Bayes-Factor crew that we need to be able to show that some effects do not exist. I argue, however, that we cannot do this with the nil-hypothesis that is used in Bayesian t-tests. The null-hypothesis has to be a range of values.”
12/9 The Demise of the Solo Experiment
“Wegener commented on the raise of multiple-study articles in social psychology. The article provides an insight into the mindset of social psychologists and the way they viewed the role of data in publishing.”
12/5 PNAS letter: Young Unarmed Non-Suicidal Male Victims of Fatal Use of Force are Thirteen Times more Likely to be Black than White
“This limited 500 world commentary shows major problems with the original article that claimed police officers are six times more likely to shoot White than Black suspects that was based on a misunderstanding of the intercept in a regression model.”
12/2 Christopher J. Bryan claims replicators p-hack to get non-significant results. I claim he p-hacked his original results
“This is a draft of a commentary on Bryan’s claim that replication studies cannot be trusted because replicators have many ways to make significant results disappear.”
November
11/28 Racial Bias as a Trait
” Onyeador et al. (2019) published the results of an impressive longitudinal study of racial attitudes, but did not use the appropriate model to model stability and change. Here I show that IAT scores have trait variance and error variance, but no state variance. “
11/24 Anti-Black Bias on the IAT predicts Pro-Black Bias in Behavior
“A series of studies shows that participants with moderate pro-White bias on the IAT showed preferential treatment of Black candidates (pro-Black bias) on a hypothetical admissions test.”
11/10 Are Positive Illusions Really Good for You?
“Taylor and Brown famously claimed that positive illusions are common and a sign of mental health. The evidence for benefits relied nearly exclusively on self-ratings. Here I show that there are no benefits when well-being is measured with informant ratings.”
11/9 Personality, Partnership and Well-Being
“Personality researchers continue to ignore method variance (evaluative bias) in self-ratings, which leads to false conclusions about predictors of well-being.”
October
10/29 The Pie Of Happiness
Diener (1984) introduced top-down and bottom-up models of well-being. Three decades later, it is still unclear how satisfaction with life-domains is linked to global life-satisfaction judgments.”
10/26 Construct Validity of the Satisfaction with Life Scale
“Psychologists spend little effort on validating measures of important constructs. Here I examine the construct validity of the Satisfaction with Life Scale as a measure of subjective well-being.”
10/25 Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey’s Social Indicators of Well-Being
“Andrews and Withey provided a seminal examination of construct validity of well-being measures. To make progress, well-being scientists need to build on this seminal work.”
10/21 The (not so great) Power of Situational Manipulations in the Laboratory
“Social psychologists assume that a brief presentation of stimuli can have profound and lasting effects on attitudes and behavior. However, most of the evidence to support this claim is based on questionable evidence and effects on real behavior tend to be weak.”
10/20 A Comparison of Scientific Doping Tests
“Here I examine the power of different bias tests to detect selective publishing of significant results.” A much more rigorous evaluation was published this year by Renkewitz and Keiner (2019).
10/20 Hidden Evidence in Racial Bias Research by Cesario and Johnson
“Cesario and Johnson do not cite an extremely relevant article, although they are clearly aware of it because they cite it in a different article. I thought these questionable practices were a thing of the past.”
September
9/24 Police Shootings and Race in the United States
“Critical commentary of Cesario and Johnson’s (un)scientific approach to examine racial disparities in police shootings. A similar criticism has been submitted to SPPS by an independent team of researchers.”
9/15 Open Communication about the invalidity of the race IAT
“Nosek and Bar-Anan published an article about the utopia of an open science. However, when I wanted to involve Bar-Anan in an open discussion about our disagreement about the IAT, he declined because he was too busy to publish more manuscripts. Apparently, open science is only an utopia if it doesn’t involve criticism.”
9/14 The Diminishing Utility of Replication Studies In Social Psychology
“A commentary on Dorothy Bishop’s blog post about the value of replication studies. I argue that more replications of flawed studies from the glory days of p-hacking are not a good use of resources.”
9/13 Confirmation Bias is Everywhere: Serotonin and the Meta-Trait of Stability
“I use an article on serotonin and personality to highlight the problem that data are often analyzed only to confirm that a theory is correct, but never used to falsify theories. As a result, there is little theoretical progress in theories of personality or in other fields.”
9/9 32 Personality Types
“A small literature has argued that there are a small number of personality types. I show that this work is flawed and that all 32 types that are produced by a split of the Big Five dimensions occur with high frequencies.”
9/7 Testing Hierarchical Models of Personality with Confirmatory Factor Analysis
“Psychometrician have developed powerful tools to test and develop reflective measurement models. However, personality psychologists make little use of these methods. To make progress, all personality psychologists must learn structural equation modeling. All of my Ph.D. students have used SEM in their work.”
9/5 Fact-Checking Roy Baumeister
“Roy F. Baumeister wrote a chapter that tries to defend ego-depletion theory and research. The chapter is filled with inaccuracies that highlight the difficulty of eminent psychologists to face reality.”
9/2 Peer-Review is Censorship not Quality Control
“I invested years of research and grant money into a project to collect data from 450 families who reported on their personality and well-being. These data were used to test the hypothesis that positive illusions are beneficial for well-being and used informant ratings of well-being to avoid the confound between measures of positive illusions and well-being. The ms. was flat out rejected. It is now in press at JRP. The editorial decision was totally biased and I resigned from the editorial board of JPSP. “
August
8/29 A Psychometric Replication Study of the NEO-PI-R Structure
“I used open NEO-PI-R data to fit a CFA measurement model to examine the theoretical structure with Big Five factors as higher-order factors of facets. The model partially supported the theoretical structure, but many items had poor loadings on the intended facet factors. This shows the problem of using principal component analysis to develop and validate models.”
8/27 Social Psychologists See No Crisis in Social Psychology
“Wendy Wood and Timothy Wilson represented psychology on an interdisciplinary commission about replicability. They are happy to report that there is no replication crisis. Take their word for it.”
8/23 A Psychometric Study of the NEO-PI-R
8/17 Brain Nosek explains the IAT
“A transcript of a podcast interview with Brian Nosek, where he answers questions about the IAT.”
8/14 What lurks beneath the Big Five?
8/13 When Personality Psychologists are High
“Digman (1997) started a line of research into higher order factors of the Big Five. He made mistakes in his models, but that didn’t stop researchers, including Jordan Peterson, from searching for high-order factors.”
8/12 Personality and Self-Esteem
8/11 The Black Box of Meta-Analysis: Personality Change
“Textbooks claim that individuals become more conscientious throughout adulthood based on a 2006 meta-analysis. New studies do not show this trend. Here I show that the meta-analysis is unreliable because it is based on very few studies with small samples.”
8/11 How Valid are Short Big-Five Scales?
8/10 Personality Measurement with the Big Five Inventory
8/6 Open-SOEP: Personality and Wellbeing Revisited
8/5 Open-SOEP: No Significant Personality Change over 12 Years
8/4 Measuring Well-Being in the SOEP
July
7/30 Personality and Health- Satisfaction in the SOEP
7/30 Personality and Job-Satisfaction in the SOEP
7/29 Personality and Life-Satisfaction in the SOEP
7/28 Measuring Personality in the SOEP
7/27 Personality Change in the MIDUS
7/17 The Misguided Attack of a Meta-Psychometrician
“Borsboom popularized network analysis, but network analysis of items avoids the
problem of validity rather than solving it.”
7/16 Well-Being Science: A Free Textbook
“I wrote this textbook for my undergraduate students because positive psychology
textbooks don’t teach the science of well-being in a scientific manner.”
June
6/20 Empowering the Underpowered Study
“It is not always possible to increase power by increasing sample sizes. The correct solution
to this problem is to increase the type-I error probability (alpha).”
6/6 Should Governments Shape Personality
“One application of psychology is to develop treatments for mental health problems (e.g. depression). It can also provide information that individuals can use to make decisions. However, it is not clear that public policy should be used to shape personality traits.”
6/4 Where Do Non-Significant Results in Meta-Analysis Come From?
“Meta-analysis often give the impression that researchers publish non-significant results, but articles hardly ever publish non-significant results. This blog post examines where the non-significant results in meta-analysis come from and what the implications for effect size estimates are.”
May
5/30 The Implicit Association Test: A Measure in Search of a Construct (in press, PoPS)
“Free copy of article in PoPS that questions the construct validity of the IAT. There is no evidence that it measures attitudes that exist outside of awareness.”
5/7 Social psychology textbook audit: Something smells fishy
“Demonstrates that research on the link between unpleasant odors and morality was obtained with questionable (fishy) research practices”
April
4/7 Social-Psychology Textbook Audit: External Validity
“Social textbook misquotes a source to claim that results from artificial lab studies generalize to the real world”
4/1 The Bayesian Mixture Model for P-Curves is Fundamentally Flawed
“This blog post shows that the Bayesian Mixture Model uses a dogmatic prior to produce inflated estimates of the false discovery rate in psychology”
March
3/31 One-tail or two-tails: That is the question
“if you want to do a meta-analysis on p-values, you need to distinguish between one-tailed and two-tailed p-values”
3/17 Replicability Audit: John A. Bargh
“Replicability Audits z-curve the most influential results of a researcher”
3/4 Psychological Science is Self-Correcting
3/1 Limited Utility of Network Models
February
2/24 Schachter and Singer: The Experiment that never was (significant)
“Schachter and Singer’s theory of emotion is still taught to undergraduate students, but their own study was never convincing”
2/17 The Validity of Wellbeing Measures
2/16 The Validation Crisis in Psychology
2/15 No Construct Validity for the Implicit Association Test
2/6 The race IAT: A Case Study of the Validity Crisis in Psychology
2/4 No Incremental Predictive Validity of the race Implicit Association Test
2/2 No Discriminant Validity of the race Implicit Association Test
January
1/25 Estimating the False Discovery Risk in the Open Science Collaboration Replication Studies
1/19 Shinny App for Zcurve (version 19.1)
1/15 Why Ioannidis’s claim “Most published research findings are false” is false
(under review)
1/13 Social Psychology Textbook audiT: Prejudice without awareness (Patricia Devine)
1/11 Social Psychology Textbook audiT: Culture of Honor
1/11 Replicability audiT of eminent social psychologists: Norbert Schwarz
1/10 Thinking clearly about Null-Hypotheses Testing with Tukey (1971)
1/9 The Proper Use of Nil-Hypothesis Testing
1/8 What do p-values mean?
1/3 Social Psychology Textbook auiT: Ease of Retrieval
1/2 Social Psychology Textbook audiT: Stereotype Threat
