How bad would these sweaty jerseys smell to you? Probably depends on how much you like the team. Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images A Pacific Standard journalist ran a nice description of a factorial design, subtitled "new research finds body odor is less disgusting if we share an identity with the smelly person in question." The …
Continue reading Our ingroup members aren’t stinky (A factorial design)
When judges inform juries of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, do their instructions work? Photo: Shutterstock In a courtroom setting, eyewitness testimony tends to be some of the most persuasive to jurors. However, eyewitness testimony is notoriously inaccurate--something most students have learned about in their General Psychology courses. This piece in the Pacific Standard explains …
Continue reading Can juries become more skeptical of eyewitness testimony?
Reading the Harry Potter books led to more tolerant attitudes, but only for certain readers. Photo: Magical Creature of Harry Potter Wikipedia / Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows / Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures © 2011 Author J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series of books, has said, “the Potter books in general …
Continue reading Does reading Harry Potter encourage tolerance? It depends.
When teachers wrote encouraging notes (rather than neutral notes) on returned papers, students were motivated to revise them. Photo: Fuse/Getty Images How do we get students to work harder? Standards in schools may be rising, which means that students are more likely to encounter failures along the road to mastery of a subject. What motivates …
Continue reading Motivating students to work harder through teacher support
Photo Credit: John Crooms/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images. "Watching 'Real Housewives' Makes You Violent" At least, that's the claim in the headline from the Daily Beast. I imagine that most of us feel squeamish after watching episodes of trashy television. But can it really make us violent? Fortunately, psychological researchers are able to test …
Continue reading Watching Some Types of Reality TV Makes you Violent…
You might not know the name "vocal fry," but if you've been on a college campus lately, you've definitely heard it: Vocal fry is a creaky, low sound that up to 2/3 of college women put at the end of sentences. A friend once called it the "sticky voice." The Atlantic just covered a research …
Continue reading Going on an interview? Avoid the “vocal fry…”
It's not every day you get to see a three-way interaction described in the news! But here's one, a study covered by the Huffington Post. The headline was as follows: Extroverted Children More Likely To Be Swayed By Environmental Cues: Study Read this study description and identify the three independent variables in the design. Identify …
Wired magazine presents a set of datagraphics depicting their ingenious analysis of the corpus of recipes on the website foodnetwork.com. I bet you'll have fun looking through the graphics. They correlated the ingredients list in each recipe with the average number of five-star rating points the recipe has received from readers. For example, one …
Continue reading Bacon makes (almost) everything taste better…here’s the evidence
How would you respond if you knew that people might stereotype you negatively? That's what one study recently asked. They wondered how people would approach a social situation if they were worried about the stereotypes the other person might have about them. The studies in question can provide you with some handy practice on factorial designs. Scientific American wrote about …
You don't see people blogging about interaction effects, at least not every day. I just ran into this 2011 Ben Goldacre column about interactions, which he describes in my favorite way, as a "difference in differences." Take a look here. Instructors, this might be a handy example for teaching Chapter 11.