Drang naar Samenhang

On the brink of 2017. Time for some New Year's resolutions. I won't bore you with details about my resolutions to (1) again run 1000k (not in a row of course), (2) not live in a political bubble, (3) be far more skeptical about political polls, (4) pick up the guitar again, (5) write more blog posts, and (6) learn more about wine. Instead I want to focus on some resolutions about research practices that Brent Roberts, Lorne Campbell, and I penned (with much-appreciated feedback from Brian Nosek, Felix Schönbrodt, and Jennifer Tackett). We hope they form an inspiration to you as well.  The Commitment Scientific research is an attempt to identify a working truth about the world that is as independent of ideology as possible.  As we appear to be entering a time of heightened skepticism about the value of scientific information, we feel it is important to emphasize and foster research practices that enhance the integrity of scientific data and thus scientific information. We h...

Update December 17. Data collection is in full swing in labs from Buenos Aires to Berkeley and from Potsdam to Pittsburgh. Some labs have already finished while others (such as my lab) have just started. Data collection should be completed by March 1.  Update October 24. Data collection has officially started. No fewer than 20 labs are participating! Besides investigating if the ACE replicates in native speakers, we will also examine if the effect extends to L2 speakers of English. Update November 11, 2021. The article reporting the findngs is now in press.  Mike Kaschak and Art Glenberg, discoverers of the famous ACE effect , have decided to run a registered replication of their effect. There already are 7 participating labs but we'd like to invite more participants. If you're interested in language, action, and/or replication and have access to subjects who are native speakers of English, please consider participating by responding to Mike's (kaschak@psy.fsu.edu) i...

With increasing attention paid to reproducibility in science, a natural worry for researchers  is, “What happens if my finding does not replicate?” With this question, Charles Ebersole, Jordan Axt, and Brian Nosek open their new article on perceptions of noveltyand reproducibility, published today in PLoS Biology . There are several ways to interpret this question, but Ebersole and colleagues are most concerned with reputational issues. In an ideal world, they note, reputations shouldn’t matter; the focus should be on the findings. But reality is different: findings are treated as possessions . Ebersole and his co-authors draw a contrast between innovation and reproducibility in evaluating reputations. Drawing this contrast is not without precedent. Some years back, I served on the National Science Foundation program Perception, Action, and Cognition. We were told that innovation was to be an overriding criterion in evaluating proposals. Up to that point, as I underst...

Update May 11, 2016. In a talk, given at Psychonomics in Granada Spain on Saturday, May 7, I discuss the contents of this and the previous post in a symposium on open science, organized by Richard Morey. My talk starts at 43:50 . The other talks are definitely worth a watch. Last week, I reported some quantitative analyses of my open-review survey. In this post I am going to focus on the respondents’ written sentiments regarding open reviews from the perspective of a reviewer. Many respondents provided written motivations for whether they disagreed or agreed with the statement “ as a reviewer, I'd like to have my review published along with the accepted paper.” They could also indicate whether they agreed only if their review would remain anonymous. A large majority (72%) indicated that they would like to see their review published. Forty-five percent of these respondents (87 out of 195) indicated that they only wanted to have their review published if they could remain ano...