Hypocrisy vs Symptom
I listened to the Know Your Enemy podcast episode "Freud and Politics (w/ Pat Blanchfield)" a year or so ago, and there's a game they play that's stuck with me ever since:
#psychology
29 posts
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On Being and Doing in Open Source
Read more → More from Relational Tech →Back in the early 2010s, I ran a program called 'Open Source Comes to Campus'. We'd go to college campuses around the country and host day-long workshops introducing students to open source, teaching them social norms and tools like git, and encouraging them to make their first contribution.
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Psychological Safety: An Exercise
Read more → More from Relational Tech →In early 2024, PlasmaPy maintainer Nick Murphy asked me to help facilitate a workshop for their project. This "summer school" would bring together community members of all kinds, from undergraduates to faculty, from experienced open source contributors to people who barely knew what open source was.
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Mistakes Were Inevitably Made
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →All models are wrong. Given this, it should be no surprise that humans are constantly messing things up. But don't worry! That's often a good thing, because messing things up is how we learn.
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Trains, Fruits, and Bombs: A Crash Course in Motivated Reasoning
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →My sister is interested in genealogy, and several years ago unearthed a gruesome family story: on June 11th, 1880, my great-great-great-grandfather Anthony was caught between two railroad cars and crushed. The newspaper called it a "horrible death", and added that he left behind a wife and five kids "in destitute circumstances".
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Power and Domination in the National Women's Soccer League
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you what to do.
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On Solutionism and Lolcats
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Spending as much time as I do teaching, writing and thinking about technology, I come across solutionism a lot. (From the link: Morozov defines solutionism as "a pervasive and dangerous ideology\... that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are 'solvable' with a nice and clean technological solution".)
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Improving trust in science
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →There's a letter in the Guardian today calling for study preregistration. This is super exciting - I've been wanting this for years.
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Why It Matters
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My father forwarded an article to me this morning: Clinical trials flawed by biased reporting. It's a write up of Bias in reporting of end points of efficacy and toxicity in randomized, clinical trials for women with breast cancer.
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Critiquing Scientific Practice in 2012
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I have a tumblr, Dismal Science, which I use to keep track of newspaper articles, journal articles, and blog posts on the topic of how scientific research is practised and the flaws and problems that have arisen. Before the archives grow unmanageable, I'd like to take a stab at organizing what I have so far. So here's a summary of the material I posted last year. (Many of the links themselves were not published/posted in 2012.)
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Psychology Links
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It's a good list, so I thought I'd also share it here.
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On Killing
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →(A discussion at last Tuesday's Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.)
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Open Science
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Over the last week, I've come across a couple new 'science experiments' - that is, experiments in improving science by encouraging the involvement of the online public. The first one, Petri Dish, is basically a Kickstarter for science projects:
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Walking Fast and Slow
Read more → More from Meta-science →Alex Tabarrok’s explanation of the controversy around a failure to replicate a famous psychology paper. The abstract of the article:
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Too Hard For Science
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren't an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed - the articles are all way too short, and some of the interviewees fail to actually propose impossible experiments, and just describe hard problems. That said, there are some real gems:
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Degrees of freedom aren’t free
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →There's another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf].
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The Social Responsibility of Social Networking Sites
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I'm usually one of the first to criticize Facebook, but I'm really pleased about the new suicide prevention initiative they've rolled out.
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Three Talks
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.
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Blinded By Results
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Last night at a dinner party made up mostly of science folks, I pitched an idea that's been stewing in my head for a while: results-blind submissions reviews for journals.
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Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Whiton Calkins, Elizabeth Spelke and the Variability Hypothesis
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →For Ada Lovelace day I thought I'd go back to my roots and write about a psychological scientist. Being as I am prone to digressions, I ended up writing about two - one historical, one current. We'll go chronologically.
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We Contain Multitudes
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I have an idea in my head for an interactive fiction story: a depressed young man sits in a cafe, waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend. Depending on what happens - what she says, whether he even gets the call, whether he talks to the older man reading a paper or the little girl playing with his shoelaces, whether he springs for the expensive sandwich and finds out he's overdrawn his account, whether an overheard phrase or a stray shadow spark a memory - the young man experiences a different future. Sometimes he reaches out for help. Sometimes he goes home and kills himself. Sometimes he lashes out in anger and hurts someone. Sometimes an instinctive, kind reaction on his part saves someone else's life.
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Ilm-al Nafsiat: The Science of Self
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I spent pretty much all my free time last week studying for the psychology GRE subject test, and I have to say that I resent how much I now know about Freud. It's not that I think studying the history of a discipline is pointless - far from it. But the history of psychology that the GRE tests is, how shall I put this\... painfully white and Western.
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Walking Away
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →There's a provocative short story by Ursula Le Guin called *The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas*. You can read it online here, and I suggest you do so before going on, because I'm about to spoil it completely.
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Lincoln's Inner War
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Several years ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly that has stayed with me: Lincoln's Great Depression.
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Delusions of Objectivity
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →As a psychologist, I find it extremely frustrating when people attempt to explain away gender differences as genetic or evolutionary, rather than exploring the role of socialization by an imperfect society. For one thing, it gives people an excuse not to confront injustice. After all, they're just doing what they're biologically programmed to do. For another, it's frequently shoddy science.
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Obama and the Fundamental Attribution Error
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The transition from Bush to Obama has been a strange one for me. There is a certain ease to opposing someone whose ideology is so different from yours. There is no need to be subtle, to try and tease apart where things are going wrong - you know why they are doing this thing that you hate: because they don't value what you value.
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Rotten Apples & Bad Barrels
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It's funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing - under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others.
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The Carrot and the Stick
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The other night I gave a talk at one of Sprout's Spaghetti dinners. I thought I'd throw it up here for everyone's enjoyment. I've edited it a little bit, because a good portion of the presentation was two experiments I did with/on the audience, which doesn't translate, but aside from that and the inevitable rambling that happens when I speak in public, this is pretty much the talk I gave. Watch for asterisks (\*), they'll be links to pdfs of the studies I'm citing.
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Human Test Subjects
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Last night, after much fun during the day, Orli, Russ, Keith, Cora and I sat down to play Morton's List. Now, for those of you who've never heard of this game, it's basically a list of hundreds of different things to do, and you roll a set of dice to randomly select your task for the evening. The trick to the game is that you can't back out, or switch to another task, unless it's physically impossible to complete the first one. The tasks are very varied - the last two times we played we got "relax" and "protest something".