More of a Comment Than a Question (Paul Connor)

In this episode we are joined by Sinan Alper, a professor of Psychology at Yaşar University in Turkey, to discuss psychological research in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts, and his work on the antecedents and consequences of COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

Follow Sinan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SinanAlper_

Some references:

1. Paper showing people holding contradictory conspiracy beliefs (e.g. Princess Diana was assassinated but is nonetheless still alive): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786

2. Civic honesty around the globe (Science paper testing frequency of returning lost wallets in different countries): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

3. The backfire effect of debunking misinformation on Twitter: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445642

4. SInan's paper on the link between intuitive thinking and social conservativism in WEIRD/non-WEIRD contexts: http://journal.sjdm.org/18/181212/jdm181212.pdf

We were joined by journalist and podcaster Katie Herzog to discuss her recent piece about an academic #metoo scandal that was not what it seemed.

You can read Katie's piece here: https://reason.com/2022/03/14/how-an-academic-grudge-turned-into-a-metoo-panic/ and listen to the BARpod episode about it here: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-106-possibly-the-craziest?s=r

Follow Katie on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog

Pinned threads by the claimants:
Jessica Cantlon: https://twitter.com/CantlonLab/status/952644834229211136?s=20&t=S3eZiKta5LD7RVRH0LwJTA
Steven Piantadosi: https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1167918514851610624?s=20&t=S3eZiKta5LD7RVRH0LwJTA

Weird website made by some unknown party concerning the case: https://thejaegercase.com/faq

We chatted with Aaron Moss, senior researcher at Cloud Research, about his recent paper on the ethics of using MTurk for behavioral research, conflicts of interest, global capitalism, and Will Smith.

Read Aaron's paper here https://psyarxiv.com/jbc9d/

Check out Cloud Research here https://www.cloudresearch.com/

We were joined by Cory Clark, director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss her research on ideological bias in science, adversarial collaboration, cheerleading, powerpoint, and more.

Follow Cory on twitter here: https://twitter.com/ImHardcory

Check out the Adversarial Collaboration Project here: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/adcollabproject/

In this episode we are joined by famous podcaster Yoel Inbar (who we also found out is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto) to discuss a recent controversy surrounding this paper in PNAS, and the ethics of training machine learning models to judge and modify facial images in ways consistent with the stereotypical impressions of humans.

We also briefly discussed the dumb stick-figure meme people have been talking about.

Here are just a few pieces of research on people's ability to judge personality from physical appearance:
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.994.7&rep=rep1&type=pdf
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/000712606X109648
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-20823-006

We discuss the moral philosophy of abortion, and make a few comments about the public reaction to the leaked Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision.

Here's some data on the stability of public attitudes toward abortion since the 70s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

And here's some data about the relative prevalence of bi-sexuality and homosexuality: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/how-many-people-lgbt/

We discuss gun violence and mass shootings in the USA, as well as the debate around 'Great Replacement Theory.'

Links:

Cloud Research's Innovations in Online Research Conference: link
Tweet thread from Professor Geoffrey Miller on gun control

In this episode we welcome marketing graduate student and TikTok celebrity Ethan Milne onto the podcast to talk about his social media fame, his research, an interesting incident at his Western University, the concept of 'elite capture,' and more.

Follow Ethan on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SEthanMilne and on TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/@tallpsychology?lang=en

The hijab kiss incident: https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/western-university-lgbtq-poster-sparks-muslim-community-backlash/wcm/c1b69e57-a678-45a4-be94-bab4044b46bf/amp/

We welcome University of Miami postdoc Shane Littrell on the pod to discuss his research on bullshitting, Paul's pretentious website, and Thomas Chatterton Williams' bad week online.

Find out more about Shane's research on his website here

We were joined by Professor Chris Ferguson of Stetson University to discuss his upcoming new book 'Catastrophe!: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse'  and whether Paul can join his Dungeons and Dragons game. Thankfully we (mostly) avoided discussing *that* Qualitative Research paper.

In this episode we discuss academic Twitter's enfant terrible Tim Gill, and wade into some complex questions considering the Safe Faculty Project and student loan forgiveness. 

Follow Professor Gill (at your own risk) here: https://twitter.com/timgill924
Check out the Safe Faculty Project here: https://www.safefacultyproject.org/about

We chatted with Professor Stuart Ritchie from Kings College London about the Queen's passing and the journal Nature Human Behaviour's plans to protect the world from harmful scientific findings. 

• Follow Stuart on his substack or twitter
• Read about Nature Human Behaviour's new ethical guidelines here

We were joined by Annalisa Myer, a grad student from CUNY graduate center, and Carlos Rebollar, lab manager of the Deepest Beliefs lab at UNC, to discuss mixing activism and science, and whether Carlos should go to grad school.

The 80,000 hours website Rachel mentioned is here

Jennifer Eberhart's book 'Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do' is here

In this episode we were joined by Steve Rathje, a postdoc at NYU, to discuss his research on how intergroup animosity drives virality on social media.

Read Steve's work here, Facebook's response here, and Steve's response to the response here.

We chatted with Professor Daniël Lakens from TU Eindhoven about his recent proposal for universities to require scientists to submit their proposed research to methodological review boards before data collection.

Read Daniël's proposal here

And check out the recent PNAS on the surprising generalizability of results from non-representative samples here

Like almost everyone else, we are impressed and a little freaked out by recent advances in AI, particularly in the context of large language models like ChatGPT, so we invited our most AI-obsessed friends and family members (Luke Hartman from Tumult Labs Alex Kogan of Scholar Exchange) on the pod to talk about it.

If you missed Alex's back story here's his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Kogan_(scientist)

And here's a link to Luke's app top topic: https://www.toptopicapp.com/

Rachel is leaving academia, and Paul is moving on to a new career stage, so we've decided to put the pod to rest. In this, our last pod, we make some final comments and send out some final thankyous as we cast MOACTAQ gently down the river. Be well, everyone.

If you'd like to keep in touch you can contact us at:
rachelxhartman@gmail.com, Twitter: @RachelXHartman
paulrobertconnor@gmail.com, Twitter: @paulrconnor

Super top secret bonus episode because Paul misses Rachel and because we can do what we want you're not the boss of us.

Rachel had a baby! Paul left academia! It is all happening and we have the world exclusive scoop for you dear listeners in this ultra special super secret extra extra final episode of MOACTAQ. 

OK, we may have a problem. 

Here, in this, our fourth attempt at a final episode, we welcome our friends from the excellent Nullius In Verba podcast Daniël Lakens and Smriti Mehta (yes THAT Smriti Mehta) to discuss why psychology is worthless. Or whether psychology is worthless. Something like that. 

Anyway, enjoy! This is the last one for sure...

We discuss the recent retraction of Clark et al. (2020) journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…56797619897915

We discuss James Heathers's Medium post explaining why he's quitting academia (and why he's not).
https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638

We talk about Harper's magazine's open letter on free speech and open debate, and the internet's response to it. 

Open letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Response: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/arts/open-letter-debate.html

We discuss the recent paper "Communicating What We Know, and What Isn’t So: Science Communication in Psychology" by Neil Lewis Jr. and Jonathan Wai.

Link to paper: https://psyarxiv.com/cfmzk

We discuss the recent Blocked & Reported interview of writer Freddie deBoer on his book "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice."
https://barpodcast.fireside.fm/22


Vaci, N., Edelsbrunner, P., Stern, E., Neubauer, A., Bilalić, M., & Grabner, R. H. (2019). The joint influence of intelligence and practice on skill development throughout the life span. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(37), 18363-18369.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/37/18363.full.pdf

On our first guest episode, we talk to our first (and only) fan, Daniël Lakens, an experimental psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology. We talk about power analyses, sample size justification, SESOI, statistical 'heuristics,' and the broader culture in psychological science.

Inspired by a twitter post by Josh Grubbs: https://twitter.com/JoshuaGrubbsPhD/status/1290652864415707139

Daniël Lakens's blog, The 20% Statistician: https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/

In this episode, we discuss the recent decision by University of California to get rid of the SAT test as part of the undergraduate admissions process. We talk about the Psychology Today articles that recently touched on this, the recommendations from the UC Academic Senate's Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF), and the recent lawsuits against universities for discriminating against Asian and Asian-American students.

We also realized that we're no professors at University of Toronto and should probably not drink while podcasting.


Psychology Today articles by Andrew Conway
Part 1: The Decision https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/channel-g/202008/the-university-california-and-the-sat-speaking-the-truth
Part 2: The Reason https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/channel-g/202008/the-university-california-and-the-sat-speaking-the-truth-0

Report of the UC Academic Council's Standardized Testing Task Force: https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

In this episode, we talk to Leif Nelson, professor at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. We talk about open science, the False Positive Psychology paper and its aftermath, current Data Colada replication efforts, and Paul's undying fascination with Leif.


False Positive Psychology: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797611417632
Data Colada (blog by Leif, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons): http://datacolada.org/
As Predicted: https://aspredicted.org/ 

This week, we're joined by Alex Koch, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth. We talk about Alex's ABC model of stereotype content, adversarial collaborations, and the utility of social cognition research. 


Ellemers et al. (2020). Adversarial alignment enables competing models to engage in cooperative theory building toward cumulative science: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7561

The ABC of Stereotypes About Groups: https://tinyurl.com/yxnnjlbf

This week, we talk about the recent self-exposé of a (now former) African history professor at George Washington University, Jessica Krug, which revealed that she had been pretending to be Black/African-American/Afro-Latinx.



Jessica Krug's medium post: https://medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-violence-of-my-lies-9a9621401f85

Medium post outing CV Vitolo-Haddad, grad student at UW Madison: https://medium.com/@polite_keppel_dinosaur_57/cv-vitolo-haddad-another-academic-racial-fraud-c5c41fe32110

Azevedo et al. (2013) Their Pain is Not Our Pain: Brain and Autonomic Correlates of Empathic Resonance With the Pain of Same and Different Race Individuals: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hbm.22133

This week, we talk about the controversy over a blog by an anonymous person on Twitter, AlvaroDeMenard, about participating in "Replication Markets, a part of DARPA's SCORE program, whose goal is to evaluate the reliability of social science research."
The thread about this on Twitter elicited a response from an editor at Science, Tage Rai, and consequently, multiple responses to that from the Open Science community.


Original thread by @AlvaroDeMenard
https://twitter.com/AlvaroDeMenard/status/1304399437641461760
Associated Blog: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/

Tage Rai's Response
https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1304985745157914624

Some notable responses to Tage
Brian Nosek: https://twitter.com/BrianNosek/status/1305319912613838850
Fiona Fidler: https://twitter.com/fidlerfm/status/1305372732889026560
Simine Vazire: https://twitter.com/siminevazire/status/1305703047096532993

Paul Meehl's lecture (starts at 46:13): https://youtu.be/7vx-A8P1BIw?t=2773

This week, we talk to Anne Scheel, a doctoral candidate at the Eindhoven University of Technology, about her upcoming paper Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses.


Scheel, A.M., Tiokhin L., Isager, P.M., & Lakens, D. (in press). Why hypothesis testers should spend less time testing hypotheses. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://psyarxiv.com/vekpu/


Kama Muta (a Sanskrit word!)
Open-access versions of all papers (including the book chapter) on the website: kamamutalab.org

Anne's recommendation for a good place to start:
Fiske, A. P., Seibt, B., & Schubert, T. (2019). The Sudden Devotion Emotion: Kama Muta and the Cultural Practices Whose Function Is to Evoke It. Emotion Review, 11(1), 74–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917723167

Fiske, A. P., Schubert, T., & Seibt, B. (2017). ‘Kama muta’ or ‘being moved by love’: A bootstrapping approach to the ontology and epistemology of an emotion. In J. L. Cassaniti & U. Menon (Eds.), Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture (pp. 79–100). University of Chicago Press. https://repositorio.iscte-iul.pt/handle/10071/16322

Last week, we spoke to our very own faculty advisor, Serena Chen! Serena's the first Asian-American chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Psychology, and one of the most refreshingly candid academics out there. We discuss the recent paper on the future of women in psychological science, on which Serena is a co-author, along with many other female faculty at Berkeley Psych. We also talk about open science, social psych literature, and the future of academia.



Gruber et al. (2020). The Future of Women in Psychological Science: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691620952789?journalCode=ppsa

150 years of Women in Psychology at Berkeley: https://psychology.berkeley.edu/celebrating-150-years-women-psychology-berkeley

This week, we talk to our friend Manuel (Manny) Galvan, a graduate student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the election, political polarization in America, the excesses of the left, cancel culture, BLM/Defund the Police, and Manny's vision of a way forward.


You can find Manny on Twitter @MGalvanPsych; his blog, The Science of Social Problems:  https://scienceofsocialproblems.com/author/scienceofsocialproblems/; and The Pipettepen: http://www.thepipettepen.com/author/mjgalvan/

Cancel culture 

Cancel culture is a significant issue for conservatives: https://theweek.com/articles/928464/cancel-culture-conservative-glass-houses

To some extent the morel panic over Cancel culture is a billionaire-funded operation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/dark-money-behind-campus-speech-wars/

https://prospect.org/justice/care-faux-free-speech-warriors-koch-brothers-paying-bills./

https://fair.org/home/panic-over-cancel-culture-is-another-example-of-right-wing-projection/

https://www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/conservative-dark-money-groups-infiltrating-campus-politics#cr

Empirical evidence of a cancel culture “crisis” on college campuses:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/free-speech-crisis-revisited/

Conservative overrepresentation on social media: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conservatives-social-media-432643 

Berkeley police bias

CPE (Center for Policing Equity) report: https://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Police/Level_3_-_General/CPE%20Draft%20Report%2007142017(2).pdf

Berkeley students call for the defunding of the UCPD: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kyxmd0FpPfFjtogxAz_dgfv4LqmKAjOTw1mN_BvikKo/edit

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/07/23/racial-disparities-in-berkeley-police-stop-data-may-indicate-racial-bias/

This week, we talk about the different responses to the election from the left, and what can be done to heal the growing political divide in this country.


Greater Good Science Center, "Bridging Differences Playbook": https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Bridging_Differences_Playbook-Final.pdf

Derek Thompson, "The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race": https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/2020-election-results-prove-density-destiny/617027/

Matthew Yglesias, "Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters should prompt some progressive rethinking": https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21548677/trump-hispanic-vote-latinx

Charles Blow, "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/opinion/election-2020-exit-polls.html

Freelance writer Tim Stone banned from Rock Paper Shotgun, https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1326240111609012224

James Lindsey's tweet criticizing Jonny Sun's tweet criticizing empathy, https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1325474944445272065

This week, we discuss the recent controversy surrounding a Nature Communications paper that looks at informal mentorship,  the gender of mentee/mentors, and subsequent scientific impact of the mentees. There has a been a call from the Twitter science community for the retraction of the paper.

Edit: Smriti mentions that someone had tweeted and asked people to email the first author, but it was actually the EIC of Nature Comm:
https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329414989032157185

Paper:
AlShebli, B., Makovi, K. & Rahwan, T.  (2020). The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance. Nat Commun 11, 5855. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19723-8


Reviewer Comments:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-020-19723-8/MediaObjects/41467_2020_19723_MOESM2_ESM.pdf


Some relevant twitter threads:

Open letter to Nature Comm editor-in-chief: https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329455882481131524

https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1329471888180072452

https://twitter.com/MGalvanPsych/status/1329798225331703811

https://twitter.com/DaniSBassett/status/1329417981353467907

https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1329475077071626240

https://twitter.com/psmaldino/status/1329520846054989825

https://twitter.com/daniela_witten/status/1329444294877384706

https://twitter.com/DrBFreeman/status/1329559143884091392



Ali G (Borat) at Cambridge University: https://youtu.be/-93MpfS5ptc?t=43

This week, we have an in-depth conversation with Kat (Kathryn) McCabe, a social ecologist and antiracism educator, about the modern antiracist movement and its potential impact on race relations.


The Change Agency: https://www.thechangeagency.ie

Short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

This week, we talk to Rob Chavez, an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon. We discuss what social neuroscience is, how social psychology can inform neuroscience, and whether our understanding of the brain can have broader impacts on society.


This is your Brain on Psychology – This is your Psychology on Brain (a guest post by Rob Chavez): https://thehardestscience.com/2018/11/30/this-is-your-brain-on-psychology-this-is-your-psychology-on-brain-a-guest-post-by-rob-chavez/


Niv, Yael. (2020, October 22). The primacy of behavioral research for understanding the brain. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/y8mxe


Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips
In additional to being a mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose is also a physicist and philosopher of science. He received the Nobel prize in Physics this year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0&t=2s

The structure that make up the mitotic spindles are microtubules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule

In our first episode of the new year,  we're joined by Rachel Ernstoff, a social psychology graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill studying intergroup relations and political polarization. In this episode, Rachel shares her fascinating background with us, after which we discuss political polarization and the research around it, the recent attack the Capitol, and Trump's Twitter ban.

Rachel's posts on The Pipettepen: http://www.thepipettepen.com/author/ernstofflive-unc-edu/
Rachel's blog: https://rationalsnowflake.blogspot.com/

ABC News, 24 Hours: Assault on the Capitol (available on Hulu): https://abcnews.go.com/US/attack-capitol-broken-24-hours-hulu-special/story?id=75184339

Twitter's post on the suspension of @realDonaldTrump: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html

This week, we chat with Don Moore, a professor in the Management of Organization group at the Haas School of Business, and author of Perfectly Confident. We talk about confidence, overconfidence, perseverance, the tall poppy syndrome, and share our favorite dad jokes.


Don's book, Perfectly Confident: https://perfectlyconfident.com/

This week, we had to cut our conversation short with a fellow social psychologist-philosopher, Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus of psychology at Swarthmore College, and a visiting professor at Haas School of Business. We discuss Barry's recent paper Science, scholarship, and intellectual virtues.


Schwartz, B. (2020). Science, scholarship, and intellectual virtues: A guide to what higher education should be like. Journal of Moral Education, 1-12.  https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2020.1772211


Some relevant TED talks by Barry:

• Using Your Practical Wisdom: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_using_our_practical_wisdom?language=en
• Our Loss of Wisdom: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_our_loss_of_wisdom/transcript?language=en

Cyanide and Happiness comic about science: https://explosm.net/comics/3557/#lIXOSa8dUTRXlpmY.16

This week, we talk to Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University. We talk about his new book, How Madness Shaped History, American politics, cancel culture, and political polarization.


Ferguson, C. J. (2020). How madness shaped history: An eccentric array of maniacal rulers, raving narcissists, and psychotic visionaries. United States: Prometheus Books.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_Madness_Shaped_History/K-iQDwAAQBAJ?hl=en

Ryan Long: When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything: https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg

This week, we chat with fellow podcaster and social psychologist Mickey Inzlicht, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and co-host of Two Psychologists Four Beer (with Yoel Inbar). We talk about the advisor-graduate student dynamic, the past and future of social psychology, the replication crisis, and discuss some of the recent Psych Academic Twitter controversies.


Two Psychologists Four Beers: https://www.fourbeers.com/

• Sexism and Racism on Campus (with Anne Wilson): https://www.fourbeers.com/58
• The COVID debate (with Robb Willer and Simine Vazire): https://www.fourbeers.com/53

Lee's tweet: https://twitter.com/PsychRabble/status/1360973699822796802

Turns out Hoegaarden is Belgian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoegaarden_Brewery

Journalist, author, and podcaster Jesse Singal joins the pod to discuss his new book 'The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills.' We also discuss some of the controversy around his work on youth gender dysphoria.

Order the book online here. You can also find Jesse on the 'Blocked and Reported' podcast, the 'Singal Minded' substack, and on twitter.

In this episode I talk with my friend Alex Kogan (formerly Alex Spectre), the former professor of psychology from Cambridge University who was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. 

If you want to know what really happened with Cambridge Analytica, or if you've ever wondered how a happy-go-lucky pro-sociality researcher could end up crashing Facebook's market value by $100 billion dollars, this is the episode for you.

I invite the amazing, intelligent, insightful Rachel Ernstoff back onto the pod to discuss 'Med-Gate,' - the court case concerning whether the University of Virginia violated the first amendment rights of expelled former UVA medical student Kieran Bhattacharya, and some more general discussion about how we should think about freedom of speech. 

Oh and Manuel Galvan showed up too. 

I chat with Professor Lee Jussim of Rutgers University about ideological bias in science, academic freedom, social science as activism vs social science as truth seeking, and tennis.

In which I welcome back Rachel Ernstoff and Manuel Galvan from the University of North Carolina to discuss what everyone else seems to be discussing: Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Republicans' efforts to ban it from schools and workplaces. 

You can read about Raj Chetty's work on social mobility across racial and gender groups here: https://voxeu.org/article/race-and-economic-opportunity-united-states, and find evidence linking affirmative action bans to reduced incomes among Latinos here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3484530

Follow Rachel on twitter at https://twitter.com/RErnstoff and at https://www.rachelernstoff.com/

Follow Manny on twitter at https://twitter.com/MGalvanPsych and at https://scienceofsocialproblems.com/

Nicole Barbaro of WGU Labs and Utah Valley University joins the pod to dispel all my erroneous beliefs and misunderstandings about Attachment Theory

Check out Nicole's website here https://nicolebarbaro.com/ , follow her on Twitter here https://twitter.com/NicoleBarbaro?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor , and subscribe to her substack here https://nicolebarbaro.substack.com/

On this episode I'm joined by Felix Cheung from the University of Toronto to discuss his research on population-level determinants of human well-being, why Hong Kong residents are so unhappy, and thew social scientific investigation of economic inequality. 

Find and follow Felix on twitter at https://twitter.com/felixckc?lang=en

In this episode a microphone-less Paul and brand new co-host Rachel Hartman discuss the general weirdness that pervades academic mentorship and scientific training, and ask 'is there such a thing as a bad grad student?' 

Link to Project SHORT event 'Pre-Grad School - Finding the Right Program and Advisor Panel': https://www.eventbrite.com/e/project-short-pre-grad-school-finding-the-right-program-advisor-panel-tickets-178209528497

In this episode we muse about one of the least popular opinions possible for an academic to have: is it possible that grad students are actually not underpaid? 

In this episode, we try to unpack the notion of offensiveness, and discuss recent controversies at Yale and Netflix. What does it mean to find something offensive, and how should institutions handle situations in which individuals invoke the notion of offensiveness? 

In this episode we are joined by Steven Zhou, a graduate student in I-O Psychology at George Mason University, to discuss personality types. good and bad science communication, and what a healthy skepticism of academic research looks like. 

It's been a big week on psych twitter! Friend of the pod Nicole Barbaro returns to help us unpack all the drama surrounding the launch of Substack U (aka the University of Austin), as well as the fifty-ninth wave of the Great Tone Debate™

Here is the University of Austin's website: https://www.uaustin.org/

And here is the paper at the center of the last few days' controversy: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bjso.12489

In this episode we are joined by air force veteran and 'professor in exile' Dave Porter to discuss the series of events that culminated in his termination from Berea College, Kentucky, and his ongoing lawsuit against the college alleging that Berea violated his and his students' academic freedom.

Some more background on Dave's story can be found here: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/07/why-did-a-christian-college-fire-a-tenured-professor/

A letter in support of Dave published by the National Association of Scholars can be found here: https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/an-open-letter-to-lyle-d-roelofs-president-of-berea-college

On this episode we are joined by Thomas Costello, a PhD candidate at Emory University, to discuss his work on the fascinating but under-studied construct of Left-Wing Authoritarianism. 

You can find Tom on twitter at https://twitter.com/tomstello_ and read more about his work at https://www.thcostello.com/

In this episode we talked with Professor Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist from the University of Chicago whose views on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) led to the cancellation of a public lecture he was scheduled to give at MIT this autumn. 

We discuss how Professor Abbot gradually became concerned enough about what he saw happening at his institution with regard to DEI that he felt compelled to raise a dissenting voice concerning on affirmative action and academic freedom.

Here is a paper by Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University, whose work Professor Abbot references in the pod, which argues that affirmative action may harm its beneficiaries in many cases: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20130626 And here is Professor Arcidiacono talking on Glenn Loury's show about more of his research:
https://twitter.com/glennloury/status/1307037150815420417?lang=hi

In this episode we are joined by Paul Cernasov, a graduate student of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina, to discuss a controversy within the UNC psychology department following an official email sent out to the department regarding the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Here is the study Paul mentioned with regard to anti-Asian racism: https://virulenthate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Virulent-Hate-Anti-Asian-Racism-In-2020-5.17.21.pdf

In this episode we respond to a disgruntled listener's critiques of our previous Rittenhouse-gate! episode, and discuss a controversial proposal on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) listserv to form a group of non-oppressed oppression researchers.

Links:

Statement by graduate students of color at UNC concerning the pervasiveness of racism in the UNC psychology department: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L6J6Ee58JM338Fu89it_iKECeWdFWwSX60W6T3eC1r8/edit

A list of references we were pointed towards as additional evidence of racism within the UNC psychology department: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UmtHuW31UDoXfFe7LT26bnDVkGrB0DzpwroAD4QRW2U/edit

Statistics concerning the demographics of SPSP members: https://www.spsp.org/sites/default/files/Member-Diversity-Statistics-December-2019.pdf

Racial Equity Tools' explainer on the reasoning behind racial affinity groups https://www.racialequitytools.org/resources/act/strategies/caucus-and-affinity-groups

Showing Up For Racial Justice's (SURJ) list of past actions taken by SURJ affinity groups https://surj.org/category/past-actions/

Opinion piece: 'Please don't ask your Black friends to teach you about racism' https://theeverymom.com/dont-ask-your-black-friends-to-teach-you-about-racism/