Academic "Fights"

Two neuroscientists wrote an extensive review of Jonah Lehrer's new book Imagine. The comments section under the review is a fascinating example of how scholars "fight".

The reviewers point out some serious concerns in their review, for example:

"He is at his best when putting his considerable talents to the task of telling a story that is true according to the facts as we know them, rather than telling a story people want to hear."

Students could critically examine how well they support these criticisms (what evidence do they provide? How do they "prove" their criticism?)

Then students could look at Lehrer's response to the critics. He starts his response with the polite phrase "Thanks for the thoughtful and critical review" and then goes on to try to answer each critique. Students could examine this "debate" and decide which evidence is most important, etc. Later in the responses, the two critics respond to the responses.

I worry sometimes that the argumentative tone of the national debate on science topics (e.g. climate change, etc.) sounds like matters of opinion and bias. Cognitively productive, scientific "arguments" like this one are great examples about how disagreements in science can be PRODUCTIVE. The history of science is full of debates like this one, and without these disagreements, science wouldn't progress!

I'd love to hear your thoughts: does anyone help students work through "scientific disagreements" like this one?

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Psychology Today's List of "Best-Kept Secrets"

I enjoyed reading this list of "best kept secrets" in psychology, but I question the title. These don't seem like "secrets" to me, but a decent list of "summaries" of bodies of research that may not be obvious or intuitive? These are the issues I'd like to talk about in any discussion about whether or not psychology is "common sense" or obvious.

This list could be the start of a discussion toward the end of the year (maybe after the exam for AP classes?). Students could discuss the validity of these conclusions, what research exists or would need to be done to justify these conclusions, and even add to the list. Based on what they learned this year/semester, what overall conclusions would THEY add to the list?

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Research Conference Opportunity for HIgh School Researchers!

Pam Marek from Kennesaw State sent the following message to the PSYCHTEACH email list earlier this week, and gave us permission to repeat the announcement here. Looks like a great opportunity for high school researchers to present their work! The folks at Kennesaw are wonderful and I bet it would be a wonderful experience for any high school students and teachers who can make it to the conference.

"On behalf of the Psychology Department at Kennesaw State University, I am extending this direct invitation to you and your undergraduate or high school psychology students to join us at the 11th Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference in Psychology (GURP) on April 14, 2012. We are also inviting post baccalaureate students and junior graduate students in their first or second year of study. The one-day conference will be held in the new Social Sciences Building on the KSU campus in Kennesaw GA. We encourage you to promote this opportunity for students to present the results of their empirical research, either in poster form or as a paper presentation. We will be awarding prizes for the best paper and poster. Please email me for a 1-page Power Point file you might print out and use to advertise GURP to your students. The deadline for submitting abstracts for review is March 21, 2012. Further information about submissions, plus directions to the college, lodging, etc., is available at the GURP website, http://www.kennesaw.edu/gurp/. If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Adrienne Williamson, awill176@kennesaw.edu, Sharon Pearcey (our Department Chair), spearcey@kennesaw.edu, or email KSU's designated GURP account, gurp@kennesaw.edu."

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Scientific Fraud

 The New York Times coverage of a recent case of scientific fraud could be a good starting point for a discussion about how science is supposed to "work", and how dishonesty and lack of replication/ oversight, etc. can cause it all to go "wrong", at least for a while.

Brief summary of the article: social psychologist Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands recently admitted to falsifying data for several of his published journal articles.

This controversy started a very lively discussion about implications and potential "fixes" on the PSYCHTEACHER listserve  - a good reason to join that listserve if you like to read those kinds of discussions

image credit: http://ktwop.wordpress.com/

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Old facilitated communication controversy and new iPad "research"

This recent 60 minutes clip about autistic folks using iPads to communicate reminded me of a Frontline clip I used to show about facilitated communication (that link takes you to google video, which makes me a bit nervous b/c I thought google video was going away?).

The Frontline clip presents a dramatic and compelling story about how a "revolutionary technique" can take hold of a group of professionals, and then goes on to show how careful experimentation reveals that what appeared to be "revolutionary" was actually just confirmation bias. I used to show the clip up to the point of the experimental design and then have groups of students design tests to gather evidence about the validity of the facilitated communication technique. Word of warning: the clip involves accusations of sexual abuse and some of the language gets graphic.

The more recent 60 minutes clip is a great feel good story, and it might be interesting to show after the Frontline video. Is there any chance some of the folks working with iPads are falling into the same cognitive "facilitated communication" traps? What are the similarities and differences?

image credit: http://tweetbuzz.us/entry/78160135/www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7385402n

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Research invitation from David Eagleman

We've posted about David Eagleman before(and here). He's a skilled neuroscience writer/researcher who has a knack for finding fascinating consciousness issues and writing/talking about them in compelling and understandable ways.

He posted an invitation on Twitter this morning: "Do you hate the sound of certain words? This may be a form of synesthesia. Pls participate in our 5 min survey: words.eaglemanlab.net"

I haven't followed the link through to the research yet (I'll have to do it at home) but if any of you out there have time to take the test, please comment about your experiences here! Might be an opportunity to get students involved in research in an easy and engaging way?

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World

After having watched the Zimbardo Discovering Psychology series multiple times every year since about 1990, I have wanted more from social psychology in terms of examples and current and relevant research to support concepts within the topic.  The author, Sam Sommers does so with humor, both pointed and self-deprecating.

I also have a colleague who is very much in the "free will" camp philosophically and I have a difficult time convincing him about the social forces that shape our behavior.  If you are like me then you will love this new book I had the opportunity to review recently.  It is called, Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World.  It will be released at the end of the year.  Short review: if you like social psychology you will like this book and it's a worthwhile read.

For years I have struggled with coming up with great examples and additional research that had not been dealt with by the introductory texts.  Now I have that book I've been looking for.  Some highlights and observations from my dog-eared copy:

1. judging people's expertise by our own narrowly ranged knowledge base
2. being seduced by character is something we do when attributing explanations of behavior
3. using famous people in advertising testimonials--do they really use the products they are hawking?
4. realizing that situations are often invisible to us--we need to learn how to see them and their influence (the tools in this book can help me do this with my students)
5. Numerous explanations of situations and the influence of context on people's behavior ("what's wrong with these people?"
6. The wisdom of crowds--how real is it?  when should we use/avoid it?
7. Asch's study, conformity and mimicry of nonverbal behavior
8. Who are you?  An examination of self-definition that is flexible by situation and context
9. What we think we will do and what we do are often very different things--some research
10. A breakdown of the Singer-Schacter experiment--some details that are missing in the textbooks
11. An overview of what is commonly called "The Lake Wobegon Effect"--where everyone is above average
12. how we are skilled at self-deception
13. achievement based on what we are told about intelligence
14. gender differences--how much is biology and how much is society
15. proximity and love--how location influences who we are attracted to
16. how making yourself visible makes you more attractive 
17. Much, much more

There are more examples and much more research referred to in the book.  Bottom line is that it is an extremely helpful book to have for support for your social psychology unit. 

If you have questions for the author, please comment below and we will do our best to get them answered.

You can find more of the author and this book at these links:

Author's website
Twitter
Facebook


posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Placebo bands, get your red hot placebo bands

If you (like Rob McEntarffer) are big fans of the placebo bands that Rob posted about back in January, you're in luck - they're back in stock! I just placed an order myself and will report back to the blog when mine arrives. I believe it will cure everything that ails me, so I can't wait!

--posted by Steve

What's Your Sign? Are You Sure About That?

For years, I've been attempting to show my students how horoscopes theoretically work (somehow the positions of stars on the day of your birth have given you a simplistic way to predict your personal future on a day-to-day basis).  I also attempt to show them that the idea is bunk--that it is a pseudoscience.

If you have not heard, recently it became public knowledge what astrophysicists have known for some time--due to a variety of factors, over time, the positions of the stars in our respective skies change.  Yup, that's right.  Your sign is probably wrong.  There had been 12 signs, but a 13th has been added.  The stars have moved about a full zodiac sign in the past 2000 years.  While astrologers are upset about this and claim otherwise, it just seems like a bit of cognitive dissonance to me.  For more details, read the article in Time magazine from the January 31, 2011 issue.

posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Daryl Bem and Controversial Research

I was catching up on the television I recorded this week and saw Daryl Bem, famous from both his work at Cornell as a social and personality psychologist and from a research methods segment on Discovering Psychology.   Bem appeared on the Colbert Report on January 27, 2011 to discuss his recent research about psychic phenomena, which Colbert calls, "Time Traveling Porn."  Fascinating ideas that have critics (Ray Hyman of "Secrets of the Psychics" fame).   Check it out to see our field as interpreted by popular culture.  Some aspects of statistics are mentioned and Bem is potentially theorizing that the cause of the results may be quantum mechanics.  Because science is political, one could use this in a variety of ways as a discussion starter.  As usual, I was left wanting more discussion of the ideas.


posted by Chuck Schallhorn

ionpsych.com

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, authors of The Invisible Gorilla (about the selective attention video we all love to show, among other fascination topics) posted on their blog about a new project Dr. Simons is doing with his students: ionpsych.com.

Dr. Simons' students will be writing each week about new research across all the subdisciplines of psychology. This may be a great resource for interested high school psych students/teachers to dip into current areas of research in a concise and readable format. The first couple posts are about the ubiquity of fMRI data over EEG data in recent studies and the relationship between stress and perception.


posted by Rob McEntarffer

Google Global Science Fair!

Psychology teachers, it is time to represent! Google recently announced their Global Science Fair and it looks like it will be quite the event! There is an entire category for "Behavioral & Social Sciences", and it looks like a fabulous opportunity for high school psychology students. The prizes for winners are darn amazing (Trip to the Galapagos Islands! $50,000 scholarship! Internship at Google!) but the goal of the project is to raise awareness of the importance of science: "We’re introducing the first global online science competition ... to help make today’s young scientists the rock stars of tomorrow." Resources for teachers are available.

There have been other opportunities for student psych research for a while: The Whitman Journal of Psychology publishes high school psychology research. The Intel International Science Fair has a strong set of entries in psychology every year. Google's science fair is definitely the new kind of the block, and it would be GREAT if psych teachers helped students enter this great opportunity so that there is a strong psych showing!



posted by Rob McEntarffer

Placebo Effect and other "faulty thinking"

I saw this list of "Top 10 Common Faults in Human Thinking" and it looks to me like it might start useful discussions:

• Would students choose these 10 or would they argue for others?
• Some of the terms used in the list probably aren't in textbooks (e.g. reactance? Herd Mentality?). Are there terms similar to these concepts that could be used to be more precise?
• How were these "top ten" chosen? Is there a way to do this empirically?
  

One of the (many!) books on my psych. reading list is Cialdini's Influence - I bet it has a much more focused and researched list of "faulty thinking"

Note: I think someone tweeted a link to this Top 10 list, but now I can't find who so I can't give them credit. Help?

By the way, the picture attached to this email shows "Placebo Bands", which are, alas, sold out at the moment (I wanted to buy them for my psychology club!). Any enterprising teachers/clubs out there want to get in the ground floor of a new market? :)

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Center for Nonverbal Studies

I was catching up on some emails and inside one of them was a link to this site, called Center for Nonverbal Studies.  The site is filled to the brim with anything and everything you could possibly want to know about nonverbal communication, from muscularity of facial expressions to citations of various scholarly work.  It would take hours to navigate and read everything here, but it could make for an excellent resource for students who are investigating the topic. 

From their site:

The Center for Nonverbal Studies (CNS) is a private, nonprofit research center located in Spokane, Washington. Underway since October 1, 1997, the Center's mission is to advance the study of human communication in all its forms apart from language. The Center's goal is to promote the scientific study of nonverbal communication, which includes body movement, gesture, facial expression, adornment and fashion, architecture, mass media, and consumer-product design.

From what I've read, nonverbal communication fits most appropriately within social psychology, with its emphasis on how our bodies and faces interact when others are around us.  Back in the late 80s and early 90s, before I taught AP Psychology (well, before it even existed) I taught an Advanced Psychology class in which NVC was an important unit.  Great stuff. 

If you recall Desmond Morris and his "Manwatching" book from the 70s or the followup studies on facial expressions by Paul Ekman, you may take pause realize that some of the content will belong in the emotions unit.  One could also tie this into the research unit with describing behavior of people with a focus of making sure not to infer while describing.

posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Google Books Ngram Viewer - Research tool?

Michael Sandler sent me a link to this Boston Globe article about how researchers are using a new tool, Google Books Ngram Viewer, to examine social/cultural trends in language use.

The Ngram viewer graphs the occurrence of any word/phrase you type in across the 15 million books Google has scanned into their database. You can even enter multiple phrases to get multiple lines.

This interactive link from the Boston Globe article is a good "taste" of what the Ngram Viewer can do (the Boston-centric bias of the terms included in the graph made me laugh too :) but I had fun just diving into the actual Ngram viewer and typing in some phrases. The phrase "high school psychology" has interesting peaks and valleys!

I liked this quote from the Boston Globe article: "Going forward, digital humanities researchers have increasingly powerful tools, but the challenge will be interpretation — finding links between quantity and meaning." This might be a good "angle" to use in a psych class during research methods: What research method(s) would students use along with Ngram viewer to try to get at "links between quantity and meaning"? Naturalistic Observation researchers have been grappling with this question for years, right?



posted by Rob McEntarffer

Das Experiment [The Experiment]

Das Experiment is a German film that fictionalizes (but has the standard disclaimer that the film was not based upon real events or people) the Zimbardo Prison Study.  The film focuses upon on subject in the film (Number 77) going from his seeing the newspaper ad for the research study, the preliminary testing, the entrance into the simulation, and the subsequent events (most of which we've all read about or even seen). 




Because the film is fictionalized, they've been able to add a love story and added some events that did not occur in the original (such as the love story and computerized surveillance of the prisoners.  In addition to many elements of social cognition, bigotry, social isolation, conformity, obedience, intentional disobedience, role playing, and other overt and subtle psychological principles, they've added some ethical issues that Zimbardo did not face.  Without spoiling anything, the primary antagonist plays the sadistic guard with particular glee.
Because of the language, nudity and sexuality, it is unlikely that any of us could/would use the film in our classes, it is an excellent one for us to view.  There are some wonderful dynamics among the prisoners and among the guards and between the two groups that those of us in psych would appreciate more than the lay person.

The trailer of the film can be seen here.  For those of you on Netlflix, the film is available on both DVD and via streaming.

Posted by Chuck Schallhorn

You Are Not So Smart

For me, this blog falls under the category of "Why didn't I find this before?" David Mcraney (who describes himself as a a journalist who loves psychology, technology and the internet") writes a provocative blog called You Are Not So Smart where he posts thoughtful musings about common "misconceptions", such as:

• Most opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
• In romance, opposites attract.
• After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong.

These ideas probably seem familiar to most of us psychology teacher-types - we talk about them (often in the research methods or social psych. chapters) and often they start lively, important discussions in the classroom.

I've always wanted to have a psychological version of the great "Bad Astronomy" webpage, and this blog comes darn close, in a way.

(personal note: I found out about this blog through a great friend, Jim Hanna. Thanks Jim!)


posted by Rob McEntarffer

Pop Psych, Scientific Psych and the 50 Myths

I'm catching up on podcasts that I missed during the pre-grad and graduation time.  I caught this Point of Inquiry interview with Scott Lilienfeld, author of 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Behavior.  The interview is a solid one which can describe for teachers (and advanced students) that makes the distinction between scientific and pop psychology.  He and the interviewer also go through a number of the myths covered in the book.  Great reading and great listening.




Posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Was the Prison Experiment an Experiment?

Michael Britt (hi Michael!) just emailed an excellent question to the Society for Teaching of Psychology listserve, and I thought the Teaching High School Psychology blog community might like to think about his question too. Michael asked: Is Zimbardo's prison study an experiment? Does it meet the criteria for experiments? I often discussed the ethical issues involved in the study but I think its interesting to think specifically about the methodology, and it might be a good exercise for students to think about what criteria a study needs to meet to "qualify" as an experiment, then examine the Prison study to see if it meets those criteria.


Posted by Rob McEntarffer

Hard Problems in Psychology?

Christopher Chabris's recent article about a fascinating conference in the Wall Street Journal got me thinking about the possibilities for high school psych students. Chabris describes some of the talks at Harvard's "Hard Problems In the Social Sciences" conference (you can find video of the talks here and a facebook page with an ongoing discussion here). Conference presenters all offered their ideas for the really big, really hard, really "over-arching" social science ideas that need to be tackled. How would high school students respond to a question like: "What are the most important psychological questions that have yet to be answered? Why are they so important? How could a researcher start to research the answers?" Might be an intriguing after AP test discussion?

Posted by Rob McEntarffer