Progress Report

It has been a while since I posted an update on my scholarly progress. A couple years ago I wrote about a life-altering event that really has influenced how I divide up my available time. I am thankfully less of a care-taker than I was even a year ago, which is a positive. I did have to take on some adjunct work and extra summer course work in order to pay down some medical bills. That is a negative. Much of my focus went to one specific meta-analysis which is currently in press. I've written just a bit about it before. That experience opened me up to a much more skeptical accounting of the state of the weapons effect literature than I had held previously. That's a positive.

In the meantime, let's recap what has already appeared in print since 2016:


Benjamin, A. J., Jr., & Oelke, S. E. (2016). Framing effects on attitudes toward torture. Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság, 13(1), 229-241.

Benjamin, A. J., Jr., & Bushman, B. J. (2016). The weapons priming effect. Current Opinion in Psychology, 12, 45-48.

Benjamin, A. J., Jr. (2016). Right-wing authoritarianism and attitudes toward torture. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 44, 881-888.

Benjamin, A. J., Jr. (2016). Aggression. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Mental Health (2nd ed.,Vol. 1, pp. 33-39). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

The article published with Sara Oelke (a former student) was officially published in 2016, but neither of us knew about its publication until 2017. I had been warned that publishing in Hungarian journals was a bit less seamless than in US and western-European based outlets, so I wasn't entirely surprised. We were both just glad to see it in print, especially since Sara worked so hard for that one. I also have the meta-analysis on the weapons effect with Sven Kepes and Brad Bushman coming out later this year. It was an ordeal and I am glad to be done with it, but found it a valuable learning experience. I have two chapters that will appear in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. One deals with Type A Personalities, and the other with implicit motives. Both allow me to indulge my increased interest in promoting a more skeptical look at major topics in my field.

Most years I go to about two academic conferences. My regular one is with a fairly small organization called National Social Science Association. They hold their annual meeting in Las Vegas each spring. I am on the board for the organization and have been for some time. I've skipped one meeting since 2005 and that was the year my wife broke her hip. Otherwise, I try to make APS sponsored conventions my priority. Every other year, APS sponsors the ICPS conference (last year's was in Vienna, and next year's is in Paris). Part of the draw for going to the APS conferences is the opportunity to sit in on some talks regarding the state of psychological research and issues surrounding replication. I also sometimes run in to old friends from back in my grad school days, and that is inevitably a positive. Budget cuts are requiring me to self-fund more of these ventures, which is quite unfortunate. I'll probably continue my travels even with the budget cuts for the short term. Longer term? Realistically something will have to change. 

That is the public side of what I do. Behind the scenes I am involved in a good deal of student mentoring. This year, I have mentored two students who completed a project for our annual Research Symposium. I mentored two students in 2017, and three in 2016. Some of this work will eventually be written up and submitted for publication, and some of these projects ended when the Research Symposium ended for that particular academic year. The more important point of the exercise in each case was to give students an opportunity to see a project through from conceptualization to presentation of findings, and finally the final write-up (at least for course grade purposes). Those sorts of hands-on experiences are crucial for understanding how scientific inquiry really works - good, bad, and ugly.  I will certainly be doing more of the same in coming years.

I usually end up as a peer reviewer for at least an article or two each year, and for a few years I peer reviewed poster abstracts for SPSP (I am taking a break from that this year). One of the perks of peer reviewing is that I have done so for journals that are top-tier as well as ones that are often overlooked. I have learned that the peer review process seems to work about the same regardless of the journal's prestige. Whether or not I should take comfort in that is another story, I suppose. What I do take away from this set of experiences is that we as scholars should be less concerned about impact factor and more concerned about just getting ideally good work published somewhere. 

In the meantime, I hope to get some manuscripts submitted over the summer as time permits. The positive aspect of working with the students who got involved in my research program is that I am sitting on some data sets that are potentially publishable, and I do have proof of concept now that an article coauthored by one of our students has been published that other projects involving my students can result in a tangible publication. Since I am at a university that focuses on teaching much more than research, I don't have a great deal of pressure to publish in the supposed premier journals in my field. For the purposes of my undergraduate students, simply having a publication to include on a CV or grad school application is good enough.