Media
The Times
A woman’s midlife Wanderlust: ‘My libido and desire came back in full force’
As a new TV drama focuses on middle-age sex drive, Karin Jones describes what happened to her at 49.
Playing nice at work could cost you success
If you're struggling to say "no" at work and instead feel the need to constantly assist coworkers you might be compromising your success. As sad as it sounds, research shows that being agreeable can come at a cost in terms of career success. It can even mean earning less over the course of your career.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-nice-success.html#jCp
Gender ‘pay gap’: personality affects income
Being high in ‘neuroticism’ and low in ‘conscientiousness’ can come at a cost in terms of income a new study has found. These effects were particularly strong for women, who benefited more than men for being conscientious but were penalised more than men for being neurotic. Narcissism & neuroticism partially explain gender pay differences. Psychopathic, narcissistic & extroverted personalities report higher income. Emotionally stable & conscientious personalities also report higher income.
The Psychological Science Accelerator’s First Year
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the blog post that started what would eventually evolve into the Psychological Science Accelerator.
What would a CERN for Psych look like? It certainly would not be a massive, centralized facility housing multi-billion dollar equipment. It would instead be comprised of a distributed network of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual data collection laboratories around the world working collaboratively on shared projects. These projects would not just be replications efforts, but also tests of the most exciting and promising hypotheses in the field.
The Guardian
Open science is now the only way forward for psychology
When we launched Head Quarters five years ago, psychology was in a pretty dark place. The field was still reeling from the impact of the Diederik Stapel fraud case – the largest perpetrated in psychology and one of the greatest ever uncovered in science. At the same time, a cascade of failures to replicate major findings was just beginning, and as if to add insult to injury, one of psychology’s most prestigious journals published a study claiming to confirm, of all things, the existence of psychic powers.
Psychologists were faced with one inescapable conclusion: that the research culture in the field was fundamentally flawed and needed urgent attention. Five years later, the field has taken some big steps forward toward righting the ship. Let’s take a look at some of those improvements.
The Psychological Science Accelerator’s First Study
We are excited to announce that we have selected our first study to be conducted with the Psychological Science Accelerator distributed laboratory network. Ben Jones and Lisa DeBruine of the University of Glasgow (http://facelab.org/) submitted an excellent proposal to test if Oosterhof and Todorov’s (2008) valence-dominance model of social perception generalizes across world regions.
A new ‘accelerator’ aims to bring big science to psychology
A study of how people perceive human faces will kick off a new initiative to massively scale up, accelerate, and reproduce psychology studies.
The initiative—dubbed the “Psychological Science Accelerator” (PSA)—has so far forged alliances with more than 170 laboratories on six continents in a bid to enhance the ability of researchers to collect data at multiple sites on a massive scale. It is led by psychologist Christopher Chartier of Ashland University in Ohio, who says he wants to tackle a long-standing problem: the “tentative, preliminary results” produced by small studies conducted in relatively isolated laboratories. Such studies “just aren’t getting the job done,” he says, and PSA’s goal is to enable researchers to expand their reach and collect “large-scale confirmatory data” at many sites.
Can teamwork solve one of Psychology’s biggest problems?
Psychologist Christopher Chartier admits to a case of “physics envy.” That field boasts numerous projects on which international research teams come together to tackle big questions. Just think of CERN’s Large Hadron Collideror LIGO, which recently detected gravitational waves for the first time. Both are huge collaborations that study problems too big for one group to solve alone. Chartier, a researcher at Ashland University, doesn’t think massively scaled group projects should only be the domain of physicists. So he’s starting the “Psychological Science Accelerator,” which has a simple idea behind it: Psychological studies will take place simultaneously at multiple labs around the globe. Through these collaborations, the research will produce much bigger data sets with a far more diverse pool of study subjects than if it were done in just one place.
The Psychological Science Accelerator
The goal of psychological science is to generate reliable and generalizable knowledge about human thought and behavior. Researchers have traditionally conducted studies in independent, localized teams, which often result in relatively small samples collected at a single site. While this traditional approach has been quite effective for understanding some aspects of human psychology, it is often akin to stargazers trying to detect distant astronomical objects with weakly powered telescopes (e.g., Simonsohn, 2015) due to limited resources and access to participants. To address the limitations of the single-site, small-sample approach, psychologists have started pooling individual resources into large-scale, collaborative, multisite projects (e.g., Many Labs, Pipeline Project, Registered Replication Reports). A stellar example is the Registered Replication Report model supported by APS. These projects involve several researchers from around the world who independently collect data about a previously published effect and pool their results into a publication-bias-free meta-analysis. The results of these projects are collectively much more informative than any of the individual samples could be. Effectively, psychological researchers can assemble “big telescopes” by coordinating their individually modest resources to generate highly informative results.