The Black Goat

It's So Complicated

All three of us were all around, at various career stages, before the "replicability crisis" became a thing. In today's episode we each share stories of our personal journeys with the larger replicability discussion in psychology, and how we went from clueless to naively optimistic to whatever we are today. Plus: A letter-writer asks how to respond to an advisor who asks you to p-hack. And Alexa tells how her students reacted to her telling them that she is an atheist.

Links:

• Do-Gooder Derogation: Disparaging Morally Motivated Minorities to Defuse Anticipated Reproach, by Julia Minson and Benoit Monin
• How Many Atheists Are There? by Will Gervais and Maxine Najle
• False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant, by Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn
• The psychology of parapsychology, or why good researchers publishing good articles in good journals can still get it totally wrong, by Tal Yarkoni
• The Ironic Effect of Significant Results on the Credibility of Multiple Study Articles, by Uli Schimmack
• The N-Pact Factor: Evaluating the Quality of Empirical Journals with Respect to Sample Size and Statistical Power, by Chris Fraley and Simine Vazire

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, or on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license.

This is episode 11. It was recorded June 21, 2017.

Nullius in verba

When a group of "natural philosophers" got together to found the Royal Society in 1660 - now the oldest scientific society in the world - they chose as their motto a Latin phrase meaning "Take nobody's word for it." In today's episode we talk about the role of trust in science. Trust can mean many things, and we talk about its tension with scientific verifiability, people's desire for trusting relationships and culture in their field, and the practical value of trust in doing our work. Plus: A letter about whether pressures to fit the mold of a job description or graduate program lead to impostor syndrome. Simine and Sanjay debrief on the ARP conference. And Alexa asks what's more intellectual, poker or chess?

Links:

• Association for Research in Personality (ARP) conference
• "What is the value of social science? Challenges for researchers and government funders" by Arthur Lupia
• Peer Reviewers' Openness (PRO) Initiative

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, or on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license.

This is episode 10. It was recorded June 12, 2017.