"Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied..."

Paul Westerberg's old Replacements-era lyrics still come in handy.

Obviously there is a point to this brief post. Although I am only catching wind of this a week late, I wanted to make sure you all were aware that whatever anti-torture provisions APA had put in place in the wake of the torture scandal in which the organization played a role are in danger of being overturned by the current APA leadership. In the aftermath of the Hoffman Report, I expressed a good deal of skepticism about the APA's ability to get its act together and truly take ownership for its part in the human rights abuses committed by our government. In this case, maintaining a skeptical stance has served me well. I am saddened, actually. Back around 2007 and 2008, I included a statement on my Social Psychology Network profile urging anyone who happened to stumble upon it to boycott the APA (withholding dues is what we called it). I kept that statement in place until the campaign had run its course. It's a shame, but it appears that whatever measures necessary to fully rehabilitate itself were barely taken, and are now apparently likely to be ignored altogether. Psychology is a very multifaceted profession, and one of our missions is supposed to be to be a helping profession (broadly speaking). Taking part in any of those practices that are considered torture by the international community is the exact opposite of helping. Acting as if we need no safeguards to prevent fellow professionals from profiting from human suffering is no way to be a helping profession. I am now convinced that the APA is irreparably broken. We desperately need an umbrella organization that can represent not only scientific rigor, but also human well-being and dignity. The opportunity for the APA to be that organization has long since passed. I take no satisfaction in its continued fall from grace.

"I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied"

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.

Learning Styles: Another Myth Bites the Dust

During my years in higher education, I have seen fads come and I have seen them go. The concept of learning styles, as currently theorized and measured, is no exception. This article explains the situation quite well. The sad thing is that often when we are evaluated as instructors, our assessments must include evidence that we cater to all possible learning styles, even though the evidence is flimsy at best. Don't get me wrong. I see some value in mixing it up a bit if it gets students engaged in the learning process. The main takeaway is that a perceived preference for learning new information does not equate to success in learning through that modality, and assessing our own instruction, let alone the effectiveness of our courses and degree programs as if the myth were true is a fool's errand.

Teaching Social Psychology: A Rethink

Earlier this semester, I taught an eight-week section of Social Psychology. This is an upper-level undergraduate course. After years of more or less augmenting whatever textbook I used, I decided to make a few clean breaks from the traditional approach to delivering course material.

In the introductory chapter, I spent some time introducing some issues regarding the replicability of social priming effects. In the methods chapter, I probably just ignored that chapter altogether and focused much of my attention to the importance of understanding the major research designs and the importance of replication. In the process I drew my lectures and discussions from various published articles on the replication crisis, in particular the research published by the Open Science Collaboration. I also noted that many of the effects that we study that are counter-intuitive and are subtle (i.e., have small effect sizes) are ones where we should be especially cautious and skeptical. I also made sure my students understood the importance of publication bias, as that may lead us to believe effects are real that may not be after they undergo further scrutiny.

Over the course of several chapters, we noted in class that some classic research either appears to not be holding up or is turning out to be inconclusive. Ego depletion research was noted as a prime example. I also pointed out some issues with IAT research, as well as research on the weapons effect, where at least the jury is clearly out when it comes to whether or not weapons prime aggressive behavioral outcomes in either lab or field research. Subliminal priming research got touched upon, as failures to replicate Bargh's work is now pertinent.

Going forward, I am going to hammer on these points more this summer and next fall. Hopefully the textbooks will catch up in the next year or so. But until then, I may have more students asking how much of what they read in their textbooks is actually real.

Serious Question

Does anyone else use Bushman's 22-item word completion task to measure aggressive cognition? If so, have you looked at its internal consistency or test-retest reliability? If so, please get in touch with me.

The potential to make positive messages go viral in dark times

Although this is an old post on Corpus Callosum, I thought it worth highlighting:

As we sift through history, we see that there have been many who would have changed the course of events for the better. Sometimes, the geometry of the Universe permits this; sometimes, it impedes it. History has a lesson for us.  As the Roman empire was crumbling, and the Dark Ages began, there was a great struggle among theologians.  They cast aside Plato, and with him, his beloved tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, and dodecahedron. Worst of all, even the supremely elegant icosahedron was tossed back into the sea. They thought the cross would solve everything.  Alas, they could only think in two dimensions. One of them dared to dissent.  He carried the peculiar name Pelagius.  He promoted the idea that humans are basically good, and that it is through their free choice of actions that they keep themselves good. In contrast, the predominant view at the time was that of St. Augustine, who believed that humans were fundamentally tainted by the original sin, and any good they had, came from the grace of god. The geometry of the Universe was not kind to Pelagius, although ultimately he managed to avoid the worst of fates.  From Wikipedia:

When Alaric sacked Rome in 410, Pelagius fled to Carthage, where he came into further conflict with Augustine. His follower Coelestius was condemned by a church council there. Pelagius then fled to Jerusalem, but Augustine's followers were soon on his trail; Orosius went to Jerusalem to warn St Jerome against him. Pelagius succeeded in clearing himself at a diocesan synod in Jerusalem and a provincial one in Diospolis (Lydda ), though Augustine said that his being cleared at those councils must have been the result of Pelagius lying about his teachings. Augustine's version of Pelagius's teachings about sin and atonement were condemned as heresy at the local Council of Carthage in 417.

Those are the people who told us to put away childish things.  Those are the people who cast aside the icosahedron as a mere trinket.  But it so doing, they brought us the Dark Ages. The online Catholic Encyclopedia contains the following commentary about Pelagius:

Meanwhile the Pelagian ideas had infected a wide area, especially around Carthage, so that Augustine and other bishops were compelled to take a resolute stand against them in sermons and private conversations.

Imagine that, being infected with the notion that humans are fundamentally good.  Is it some kind of virus?

I saw in this passage a reminder that the concept of ideas going "viral" has been with us as a species for a long time - easily predating the current era of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and a plethora of social media platforms (within the context of which we usually discuss news, ideas, gossip, videos, and such going viral) and undoubtedly going well back to a time when we relied upon the oral tradition as our medium for communication. Clearly, the power structure of the Church of Pelagius' era considered his ideas viral in a negative sense, due to their subverting the prevailing dogma. And yet one could make a case that Pelagius' ideas were viral in a more positive sense, as a potential cure to the oncoming darkness, to the extent that those open to his ideas might see the path to salvation in a much more positive view of themselves and their fellow humans. Under better circumstances, Pelagius' ideas might have been more successful. I am reminded of a scene from the film I Am Legend in which the protagonist Robert Neville discusses Bob Marley with Anna:

He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate… literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people’s lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why – He said, “The people, who were trying to make this world worse… are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness.”

As a social psychologist and especially as an educator, my work involves injecting something different into people's lives: the intellectual skills needed to think sufficiently critically as consumers (and hopefully producers) of science and as consumers of mass media. The messages I try to make go viral involve actively following the data wherever they may lead us to find closer and closer approximations of the truth, and in doing so setting us free. Even better, each of us has the power to learn these skills and use them. They require effort and discipline, but in time, any one of us can develop expertise in an area that can change others' lives for the better.

We live in troubled times, as events over the past two years have made abundantly clear. It appears at times as if we as a species are staring into the abyss of darkness once more. What ideas, what actions, might go sufficiently viral in order to instead make this world better rather than worse? Who among us will light up the darkness? Will we each do so in our own way?

Food for thought

Here's a blog post worth reading: The Meaningfulness of Lab-Based Aggression Research

The main take-away from the post is the need to focus more on assuring our research results replicate, that our measures of aggression are sufficiently valid (in this case meaning actually relate in some meaningful way to aggression in everyday life), and that in the meantime we be cautious about what our research is actually telling us. To me this seems fairly common-sense, but regrettably needs repeating.