Guest Author • Feb 21, 2018 •
Christopher J. Ferguson, Stetson University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Broward County, Florida high school, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games … Read More
Guest Author • Feb 15, 2018 •
Robin Kramer, University of Lincoln This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. We often need to make decisions about sequences of things or people rather than just a single item in isolation. For instance, in an everyday setting, we might choose which smartphone to buy after trying out several. There are … Read More
Ken Perrott • Dec 06, 2017 •
Frankly, these days I just get turned off by media reports of studies showing statistically significant relationships as evidence for or against the latest health or other fads. I was pleased to read this Nature article – Five ways to fix statistics – recently as it mirrors my concern at the way statistical analysis is sometimes used to justify or confirm a bias and not … Read More
Sarb Johal • May 16, 2017 •
“Right now we have a health hazard to democratic functioning.” Those are the words of Professor Sam Wineberg of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in the United States, my guest on this edition of The Psychology Report. You can listen to the original podcast here, as well as reading our conversation below. Professor … Read More
Paul Walker • Apr 07, 2017 •
No. At the AEA website Tim Hyde discusses a paper in the American Economic Review (2017, 107(4): 1207–1238) which asks the question “Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?” The paper is by Manuel Bagues, Mauro Sylos-Labini, and Natalia Zinovyeva. In many countries there are concerns that male-dominated tenure committees that are convened to decide … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Apr 07, 2017 •
The Institute of Physics has just released a report on recent interventions designed to improve the uptake of physics at ‘A’-level by girls*. Although there have been considerable efforts in the UK to improve the gender balance over two decades, there has not been any substantial change – about 20% of a typical A-level physics class is … Read More
Ken Perrott • Jan 25, 2017 •
Maybe just a small lesson – but an important one. We should always look at context and not cherry-pick that which confirms our bias. In particular, we shouldn’t simply repeat social media claims without doing a bit of fact-checking for ourselves. It’s an important lesson at the moment because there is a lot of this going on in the social … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 14, 2016 •
By Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber – a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means … Read More
Ken Perrott • Nov 17, 2016 •
The media, establishment figures, and seemingly many of Clinton’s supporters, were surprised at Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections because they think like warriors instead of scouts. Julia Galef described these different thinking processes in the video below – which I posted 6 months ago (see Are you really right?). Last week’s US presidential election result, the public uproar … Read More
Mark Hanna • Oct 31, 2016 •
The New Zealand Herald and Jimbo’s have provided us with an idealised “bad science” case study. The New Zealand Herald article Today, the Herald published an article about a “trial” published by pet food manufacturer Jimbo’s: No bones about bones The trial was intended to evaluate how eating bones affects the dental health of dogs. Thankfully the … Read More