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Research Practices in Psychology and How We Communicate About Them
Full text linkThis dissertation attempts to examine research practices and the way we communicate about them in parts of the research process that may not always be at the forefront of people’s minds. When researchers recruit participants for their studies, do we ever wonder what they think about how we treat their data? In Chapter 1, I examined psychology research participants’ opinions about (mostly) common research practices in psychology, including questionable research practices (QRPs; e.g., p-hacking, HARKing) and practices to increase transparency and replicability. After running a study, researchers then write it up as a manuscript, which is how most research gets communicated to relevant stakeholders. But do different groups of researchers communicate their findings differently? In Chapter 2, I investigated which groups of researchers might be more or less prone to hedging their conclusions in their research articles, a first step towards better understanding when and why researchers make strong claims about their findings. Finally, when findings get disseminated to the public, which research practices are being rewarded with media attention? In Chapter 3, I explored what information science journalists use when evaluating psychology findings’ trustworthiness and newsworthiness. By examining these often-forgotten aspects of research practices and their consequences, I hope to encourage more research on how we do and communicate psychological science
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The person from the inside and outside
Full text linktextHow do we discover a person’s true personality? How does personality appear from the inside (i.e., to the self)? How does that differ from how personality appears from the outside (i.e., to the observer)? Given that people often see themselves differently than they are seen by others, what are the conditions under which each perspective is accurate? These questions are central to understanding who a person really is and, in turn, how much people are aware of their own and others’ personalities. The goal of this dissertation is to examine these questions. I begin by providing a descriptive account of the differences between self- and other-perceptions in terms of positivity and accuracy. Specifically, in the first two studies, I compare how people see themselves to how they are seen by their friends, romantic partners, parents, and siblings (Chapter 2). Then, in the next two studies, I test the accuracy of self- and other-predictions of behavior by comparing them to actual naturalistic behavior recorded from people’s everyday lives (Chapter 3). Finally, in the fourth study, I examine the accuracy of self, friend, and stranger ratings of personality by comparing personality judgments to laboratory-based behavioral tests of personality (Chapter 4). The results show that self-perceptions are more negative than others’ perceptions of them, people are more aware of their own negative traits than their positive traits, and they fail to notice a substantial number of their own characteristics. Observers agree substantially about what a person is like, and their knowledge of a target’s observable personality is quite good. By comparing perceptions of the person from the inside and outside with objective behavioral criteria, we can come to understand the strengths and limitations of each perspective. In fact, the two perspectives often complement each other – one filling in the gaps left by the other. Furthermore, even when both perspectives are accurate, they are often accurate in different ways. Thus, although neither perspective alone can explain the whole puzzle of who a person really is, they both provide different pieces of the puzzle and together deepen our understanding of the person.Psycholog
Safer science: making psychological science more replicable
No full textA fundamental part of the scientific enterprise is for each field to engage in critical self-examination to detect errors in our theories and methods, and improve them. Psychology has recently been undergoing such a self-examination. Psychological scientists arguably tackle one of the hardest phenomena to understand and predict: human behavior. Naturally, our data are noisy and our findings are often tentative. However, we are slowly building knowledge and making our theories more complete. The recent self-analysis has revealed several ways we can further improve our research practices to make our findings more sound, including: collecting larger datasets (more participants, more kinds of measures, more observations), being more transparent about our research process and results, and conducting more replications. These new norms are gaining steam within psychology and beyond, making science stronger.Lansdowne Lecture SeriesFacultyUnreviewe
Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science
Full text linkThe replication crisis in the social, behavioural and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research.</p
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Attention Is Automatically Allocated To Negative Emotional Stimuli
Full text linkIntroduction to special topic “Is psychology self-correcting? Reflections on the credibility revolution in social and personality psychology”
No full textNo abstract available.notReviewedpublishedVersio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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