Social Psychology in the Information Age: May 2015

Friday, May 29, 2015

An issue that we knew would eventually need addressing

It practically goes without saying that we live in a period of history in which social media are a primary means of communication for many of us. With this change in how we socialize, we have seen an increase in the development of large scale experiments using as unwitting participants subscribers to services such as Facebook. I've briefly discussed this before. In that spirit, I would like to direct you to a well-thought-out post by Dr. Ilka Gleibs, entitled the importance of informed consent in social media research.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

From the "Apparently Too Good To Be True" Department

Check this out:

Last December, a study on how social contact makes lasting change in people’s attitudes towards gay marriage made headlines. On Tuesday, Donald Green, co-author of the paper, asked Science to retract the paper following concerns raised by David Brockman, Joshua Kalla, and Peter Aronow. This story has been covered in several outlets, including Vox, This American Life, and Buzzfeed. Green gave an interview with Jesse Singal for The Science of Us. A statement from the lead author, Michael LaCouris forthcoming.

From what I gathered, the original published results seemed to fly in the face of what had been accepted wisdom, based on a fairly substantial body of evidence. In and of itself, that is not necessarily a problem. Sometimes someone comes up with a novel way to examine a research question and finds something useful. Needless to say, Brockman and colleagues attempted to replicate the LaCouris and Green findings and instead found some glaring anomalies that suggested potential fraud. There's an old saying in the business world: "trust but verify." That is true in the sciences as well. Sometimes that verification process breaks down, and when it does, it opens up the risk for very regrettable outcomes. For those pushing for open archiving of published data and the like, I think this will give some needed fuel for the fire.

In the meantime, we're left with another truism: "If it seems to good to be true, it probably is."

About

Hi! I am A. James Benjamin, Jr., PhD. Most folks call me James or JB eventually.

I am an educator trained as a social psychologist. I work as an Associate Professor at University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. I earned my PhD from University of Missouri-Columbia in 2000. Much of my research has touched on cognitive and behavioral effects of aggression-related cues (e.g., video games and weapon images), increasingly from a critical and skeptical perspective. I have also examined person variables such as authoritarianism and short-term media exposure in relation to attitudes toward violence and toward torture. My more recent interests involve the psychometric properties of various measures of aggressive cognition that are commonly used by aggression researchers. My work intersects with that of related researchers in areas such as Media Communication.

As an educator, I primarily teach methodology courses and the undergraduate survey course in social psychology. I also regularly teach the introductory psychology course. I make a point of introducing students at all levels to the replication crisis. Increasingly, I am trying interactive activities to engage students to become more critical readers of the research literature in my field.

I use this blog to express my own professional and personal perspectives. This blog is completely independent of any organizations with which I am affiliated. Assume that the views I express here are exclusively mine and do not reflect the views of any employer.