Social Psychology in the Information Age: For those visiting from Retraction Watch:

Friday, December 6, 2019

For those visiting from Retraction Watch:

Retraction Watch posted an article about two retractions of articles in which Qian Zhang of Southwest University in China was the lead author. Since some of you might be interested in what I've documented about other published articles from Zhang's lab, your best bet is to either type Zhang in the search field for this blog. Or just follow this link, where I have done the work for you. I'll have more to say about these specific articles in a little bit. I think I documented some of my concerns on Twitter last year and pseudonymously on PubPeer. In the meantime, I am relieved to see two very flawed articles removed from the published record. Joe Hilgard deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his work reanalyzing some data he was able to obtain from the lab (and his meticulous documentation of the flaws in these papers), and for his persistence in contacting the Editor in Chief of Youth and Society. I am also grateful for tools like Statcheck, which enabled me to very quickly spot some of the problems with these papers.

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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.