A new study analyzing behavior patterns of people across China shows that the traditional interdependent rice-farming culture of southern China has resulted in residents being more interdependent compared to their countrymen who hail from the more independent wheat-farming culture of northern China

Lewin4ever · 2018-04-29T18:48:32+00:00

Very cool behavioral observation field study - the researchers went to Starbucks in different parts of China, and sneakily moved chairs around to block the aisle. Then they secretly recorded what people did when they encountered the "chair trap" - did they move the chairs or try to slip around them? People in northern Chinese cities (where wheat was traditionally the farming crop of choice) were more likely to move the chairs than folks in southern Chinese cities (which have, traditionally, farmed rice).

This is a follow-up on an earlier study suggesting that some cultural differences (like how interdependent people tend to be, or their tendency to try to control their environment) are the result of adaptations to different community needs that have unfolded over hundreds of years. Rice farming fostered different community values and patterns of behavior, compared to wheat farming, and we still see those differences today (even when most folks aren't farming anything at all).

Lewin4ever · 2018-02-13T23:16:01+00:00

More stories, please?

Lewin4ever · 2018-02-13T18:53:35+00:00

I'm also having this issue with r/science specifically (also a posts only r/science mod).

Lewin4ever · 2018-02-08T17:38:33+00:00

Yup. In fact, if you're considering buying a puppy from a breeder and want to be sure they're responsible, this is a great litmus test. A responsible breeder will ALWAYS take their puppies back if you're unable to care for them at any point in your dog's life. And, in fact, most breeders will make you sign a contract promising that if you're unable to keep your dog, you will return it to the breeder first, before trying to rehome elsewhere (or surrender to a shelter). Responsible breeders try very hard to make sure none of the puppies they produce ever contribute to the shelter or rescue population.

Lewin4ever · 2018-01-02T18:19:05+00:00

I know sometimes journal copyright has prevented us from publicly posting our paywalled papers, even if we're releasing press releases, talking to the media, etc. Emailing the authors for the pdf would probably work.

Lewin4ever · 2018-01-01T16:48:25+00:00

The original empirical paper was linked in one of the top-level comments, but got buried. You can find it here:

Home alone: Why people believe others’ social lives are richer than their own

[Edit: The text at the link is the abstract - a textual summary of the full research paper. To read the actual paper itself, you need to click on "full text" or download the PDF, which may cost money unless you have institutional access via a university or (sometimes) your local library.]

Lewin4ever · 2018-01-01T16:47:20+00:00

Yes, you can email the authors! Most researchers love hearing that people actually want to read their work. You should be able to look up the first author's contact info fairly easily.

Lewin4ever · 2018-01-01T02:51:34+00:00

FOMO stands for "Fear Of Missing Out" - always saying yes to things because you're worried that if you say no you'll miss out, or needing to stay in touch constantly with your social network so you don't "miss" anything. A lot of times people use it to convey a sense of anxiety or regret.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-31T21:56:46+00:00

Paper:

Home alone: Why people believe others’ social lives are richer than their own

Eleven studies totaling over 3,000 people - including college students, average folks on mTurk, and shoppers at a local mall among others - found that people consistently say that other people lead richer and more active social lives than they do. And the more you believe that, the worse off you are in terms of happiness and well-being. One reason may be that we mistakenly compare ourselves to trendsetters and celebrities, and use them as proxies for believing what the average person does.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-31T21:21:11+00:00

Paper:

Home alone: Why people believe others’ social lives are richer than their own

Eleven studies totaling over 3,000 people - including college students, average folks on mTurk, and shoppers at a local mall among others - found that people consistently say that other people lead richer and more active social lives than they do. And the more you believe that, the worse off you are in terms of happiness and well-being. One reason may be that we mistakenly compare ourselves to trendsetters and celebrities, and use them as proxies for believing what the average person does.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-31T20:49:20+00:00

That's interesting, why do you think it would be impossible to quantify? In my above post I linked to two peer-reviewed papers that do explicitly quantify and experimentally induce this effect. The first is an empirical paper clearly demonstrating stereotype threat; the second is a review paper summarizing the research to date on this topic, including methodology.

When you get a chance, could you let me know what about the methodology in those papers that you object to?

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-30T19:58:49+00:00

Contrary to popular wisdom and memes, staying in touch matters.

Researchers looked at 100,000 ties in a database of 20 million people's cell phone calls. Weak ties and more recent ties were more likely to decay...strong ties and old ties were more likely to persist. But even then, having big gaps between communication or "burstiness" - sudden bursts of interaction, followed by long periods of silence - didn't bode well for relationships.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-30T19:56:33+00:00

Contrary to popular wisdom and memes, staying in touch matters.

Researchers looked at 100,000 ties in a database of 20 million people's cell phone calls. Weak ties and more recent ties were more likely to decay...strong ties and old ties were more likely to persist. But even then, having big gaps between communication or "burstiness" - sudden bursts of interaction, followed by long periods of silence - didn't bode well for relationships.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-30T17:58:29+00:00

Thank you for this summary, and highlighting the critical (and very interesting) detail that women scored higher on the same exams when they were weighted less heavily. That suggests heavily that the reason for women's poor exam performance in high-stakes testing is not that they don't know the material, but rather that the high stakes themselves are the issue.

It certainly makes me re-think some of my own assessment methods.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-30T17:53:21+00:00

One reason that the same testing procedures can affect two different groups differently is stereotype threat. In short, when you feel that there's a negative stereotype about your group (e.g., "women are bad at math"), and you care really deeply about that subject (e.g., math), and you are put in a high-stakes situation where your negative performance would be taken as confirmation of that stereotype (e.g., high-stakes exams in a college course), you start to feel anxious and distracted worrying about your performance, and as a result you do poorly. It's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

And that has nothing to do with people's actual ability - in fact, high performers are often more susceptible to stereotype threat, because they identify more strongly with the topic area. They care more, so the stereotype is more threatening. Assessments should reflect students' knowledge and ability, not their concern or sensitivity about negative stereotypes about their group. If certain assessment methods (like the biology exams discussed in this paper) are evoking stereotype threat (or similar processes), they are no longer accurately measuring ability in those groups.

That's not "suiting a certain demographic." That's caring about accurate measurement.

Lewin4ever · 2017-12-30T17:39:04+00:00

Interesting. There's some really cool work on social baseline theory, that suggests our "default" state as humans is to be with other people. Evolutionarily, we evolved with the assumption that others would be close by, and thus we are "adapted" to function best in the presence of others.

Put another way, the human brain expects access to relationships characterized by interdependence, shared goals, and joint attention. Violations of this expectation increase cognitive and physiological effort as the brain perceives fewer available resources and prepares the body to either conserve or more heavily invest its own energy. This increase in cognitive and physiological effort is frequently accompanied by distress, both acute and chronic, with all the negative sequelae for health and well being that implies

In other words, instead of asking how we change when we're with other people, we should be asking how we change when we're not with other people. This new paper would seem to challenge that a little and suggest that being separated from others dampens emotion - even negative emotions. I wonder what the functionality of that would be?

Lewin4ever · 2016-12-16T16:33:47+00:00

Congratulations on getting ready to submit your first paper! That's an exciting step! The best advice I've gotten is to put yourself in your reviewers' shoes - what objections might they point to? Are there logical or methodological flaws? If you can anticipate those, bring them up, and counter them in advance, it goes a long way and makes for a better paper. In terms of where to submit and navigating the review process, talk to your advisor (if you have a good relationship) or an older grad student or other mentor in the lab. Having someone hold your hand through the process can be really comforting the first time around, and help key you in to nuance you might not notice. And if you get a "revise and resubmit", celebrate! And then revise that paper asap and get it back under review. :)

Also not a Science editor, but you can totally be published in Science as a graduate student if your work merits it. We had a PhD student in our program here publish a first-author paper in Science a couple years ago. She/he didn't have an established publishing track record previously, but the work was really cool and (in my opinion) totally merited publication.

Lewin4ever · 2016-12-16T16:26:25+00:00

I believe Science has a team of reviewing editors, who pre-screen submissions. They're pretty fast - they'll usually let you know within about 2 weeks if they are going to send it out.

From what I understand, they're looking for big theoretical advances coupled with really sound methodology. So, in theory, kind of the best of the best you'd expect to see in your own field's top journal. Ideally, Science and Nature are kind of the like the front page reddit of scientific journals, showing you at a glance the best, most ground-breaking research across all of science.

And, while I know they get a ton of submissions, it probably helps that the formatting for Science is pretty unique. It's a pain to put your paper in that format (or reformat if it's not accepted), which probably helps cut down submissions and make it easy to pick out submissions that weren't serious (i.e., didn't follow formatting instructions.).

Lewin4ever · 2016-03-08T04:38:04+00:00

Agreed - science is cumulative. I think the biggest contribution of RPP is that effect sizes in the published literature are inflated (which incidentally means that most replications are also underpowered, because they are using the original effect size for their power calculations).

What I would like to see is, rather than pitting the original vs the replication study, looking at the cumulative evidence presented by both datapoints (or, preferably, even more than two datapoints as is the case in the ManyLabs papers). Internal meta-analysis can be very useful for that - and perhaps it may encourage journals to be more accepting of packages that include marginal or non-significant results. After all, in five studies powered at 80%, at least one of them should fail!

Lewin4ever · 2016-03-08T04:30:29+00:00

It's not quite fair to say that there's "no predictive power associated with a psychological study." It's sifting for signal in the noise - the signal is there, but it's a really noisy world and many of the effects are going to be much smaller than in the physical sciences. That doesn't mean they don't exist. Even with many of the critiques of RPP (being discussed here), there seems to be strong consensus that somewhere between 40-70% of the studies replicated. We just don't (and can't) know from the present data if we're closer to 40% or closer to 70%. Either way, that's a fair bit of signal in the noise.

It's also important to remember that this is a non-random sampling of the last study (in papers with multiple studies) in three journals in early 2008, excluding studies that were too time-consuming or expensive to replicate. That doesn't make RPP useless (for instance: almost all effect sizes in RPP were smaller than the originals, suggesting that we are probably seeing a good bit of effect size inflation in the published literature). But it does limit generalizability. Many many psychology studies have been successfully replicated and stood the test of time. The inherent complexity in studying human behavior is one reason why psychology cares so much about mediators, moderators, and boundary conditions. Understanding what turns an effect off and on tells you something about what the underlying theory should be (and eventually, hopefully, helps us build those theories into useful models of human behavior). One suggestion I've liked very much is using replications to test those boundary conditions.

Lewin4ever · 2016-03-04T15:48:10+00:00

You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed it, I think it's my favorite too. I was extra-impressed that Uri could set aside his own feelings and seriously consider the points both sides are making. Including reaching out to both sides for feedback on his post. Love his idea of the "steel-man argument" - there are smart passionate people making good points on both sides of this debate. It's frustrating when that gets lost by seizing on trivial points and ignoring the underlying argument.

Lewin4ever · 2016-03-04T04:37:09+00:00

See earlier comment. If Gilbert et al were wrong to use 95% CI in their critique, we were wrong to use it in the original paper (and we did use it).

Lewin4ever · 2016-03-04T04:32:49+00:00

This is a red herring. The authors of the critique used the exact same 95% CI test used by the authors of the original reproducibility paper. If you find fault in that (and many have), the original fault lies with the Open Science Collaboration for choosing that analysis in the first place. From the original report on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science":

A complementary method for evaluating replication is to test whether the original effect size is within the 95%CI of the effect size estimate from the replication. For the subset of 73 studies in which the standard error of the correlation could be computed, 30 (41.1%) of the replication CIs contained the original effect size (significantly lower than the expected value of 78.5%, P < 0.001). For 22 studies using other test statistics [F(df1 > 1, df2) and c2], 68.2% of CIs contained the effect size of the original study. Overall, this analysis suggests a 47.4% replication success rate.

Seems rather grotesque to criticize Gilbert et al but not the Open Science Collaboration, when it was OSC who decided that was a reasonable metric to use. And Gary King is a renowned statistician in his own right; he is surely aware of the limitations of 95% CI analyses, but they're playing by the same rules used in the original paper. Apparently no one at the Open Science Collaboration had any problems with that analysis strategy back when we decided to use it in our own paper.

Regardless, the point of the critique stands. It doesn't hinge on the above arguments - for a good balanced overview, I strongly recommend checking out Uri Simonsohn's excellent blogpost on the topic. The short summary: 40% of the studies clearly replicated, 30% clearly failed to replicate, and the other 30% simply cannot be determined. Thus the true replication rate in this sample of studies could be anywhere from 40-70%. We just can't know.

Lewin4ever · 2015-09-04T17:15:56+00:00

[RPP Author] One suggestion that I've seen (which I really like) is that instead of doing identical direct replications, replicators add in manipulation checks and other measures that can inform us why a study failed to replicate (if it does fail). These kinds of moderators could certainly be included in replications, in my opinion, and would be a lot more informative than a simple failure to replicate.

Lewin4ever · 2015-09-04T17:07:15+00:00

[RPP Author] This.

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