Drang naar Samenhang

De feestdagen komen eraan. Wat zeg ik? Ze zijn ten dele al begonnen, zoals deze adventsmarkt in Bad Kleinkirchheim, Oostenrijk laat zien.  Bij feestdagen horen tradities, gebruiken en rituelen. Vooral rituelen spelen een bijzondere rol, omdat veel feestdagen een religieuze achtergrond hebben. Maar wat is eigenlijk een ritueel en hoe is een ritueel psychologisch relevant?   Om met die eerste vraag te beginnen, een ritueel is een (a)  vooraf gedefinieerde reeks die worden gekenmerkt door starheid, formaliteit en herhaling, die (b)  is ingebed in een groter systeem van symboliek en betekenis, maar (c)  elementen bevat die geen direct instrumenteel doel hebben.   Ik zal dat even uitleggen. Een ritueel heeft een grotere starheid dan bijvoorbeeld een gewoonte. Je zou een ritueel kunnen zien als een bijzonder star script. Over scripts heb ik het veel in het boek Drang naar Samenhang . Scripts zijn stereotypische opeenvolgingen van gebeurtenissen.   Een bezoek...

Jarenlang heb ik een Engelstalige blog gehad, Zeistgeist (geen tikfout, maar een woordspeling op mijn woonplaats), waarin ik over wetenschappelijk onderzoek binnen de psychologie schreef. Die blog was bedoeld voor vakgenoten over de hele wereld.   Zeistgeist is nu omgedoopt tot Drang naar Samenhang. De nieuwe titel verwijst naar de drang die wij allemaal voelen om samenhang te zien in wat er om ons heen gebeurt, of waarover ons verteld wordt in verhalen. Ik ga verder in het Nederlands (although an occasional post in English is not out of the question). Ik heb gemerkt dat ik het de laatste jaren steeds belangrijker vind als wetenschapper om te communiceren met mensen meer in mijn directe omgeving. Ik denk dat de coronaperiode daar iets mee te maken heeft.  Drang naar Samenhang is een blog voor iedereen (wat je achtergrond ook is), die geïnteresseerd is in de psychologie van het begrijpen. Wat ik  precies bedoel met de psychologie van het begrijpen, kun je lezen in mijn boe...

  I wrote a popular science book. It is on comprehension and ranges from the understanding of words to the forming of conspiracy narratives. I wrote the book in Dutch. The title is Drang naar Samenhang: De Psychologie van het Begrijpen . An English translation would be Compulsion for Coherence: The Psychology of Comprehension .  Why did I switch to my native language, where it would have been easy—or maybe even easier-- for me to write the book in English? I had, after all, only written in English about comprehension before. There are several reasons for my linguistic U-turn.  First, I wanted to write something that the people around me would enjoy: Dutch speakers who might be interested in the topics I am discussing but won’t necessarily read a book in English. It is gratifying to receive messages and comments from people outside the field who find the book both useful and fun to read. I can’t say I have ever received such comments from people outside the field about any...

Five years ago, I wrote a post about COAST , a method of sequential testing proposed by Frick (1998). Time for a follow-up. In this guest post, my student Yiyun Liao, with the help of my colleague Steven Verheyen, writes about her experience using this method. She concludes with some tips about using COAST and about the importance of performing simulations and preregistering your research.     Yiyun Liao     Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies     Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands     liao@essb.eur.nl   Recently I, together with Drs. Katinka Dijkstra and Rolf Zwaan, conducted a study on two English prepositions: to and towards . Instead of following a conventional fixed-sample testing method, we adopted a flexible sequential testing method based on Frick’s COAST method (Frick, 1998). A very interesting case occurred after we finished our data analysis.   The Study The study was intended to replicate what we ha...

On June 17, Anders Ericsson, a giant in the field of psychology, passed away. Neil Charness, who knew Anders Ericsson much better than I did, has written a heartfelt and beautiful in memoriam . Here, I am merely describing some memories of the 13 years that Anders was my colleague. At the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Washington DC, I was on my way to a poster session, when I was approached by a bearded and somewhat burly gentleman in a blue blazer. He was extremely polite, introducing himself by making slight bow, which I thought was both quaint and endearing. It was Anders Ericsson. I told him I knew his work on protocol analysis and, in fact, owned his 1984 book with Herbert Simon, which I’d bought as an undergraduate student. He told me there was an assistant professor position in his department and if I considered applying. Several months later I had accepted the position. And a few months after that my small family and I moved to Tallahassee in June, 1994. And...

My former colleague Roy Baumeister famously said that replication is a "career niche for bad experimenters.”* I like to use this quote in my talk. Roy is wrong, of course. As anyone who has tried to conduct a replication study knows, it requires a great deal of skill to perform replications. This leads to the question Is there a career niche for replicators? I was asked this question yesterday when I gave a talk on Making Replication Mainstream at the marvellous Donders Institute for Cognition, Brain, and Behaviour  in Nijmegen. I get asked this question regularly. My standard answer is that it is not a good career choice. Implicit in this answer is the idea that in order to become a tenured faculty member, one has to make a unique contribution to the literature. Promotion-and-tenure writers are always asked to comment on the uniqueness of a candidate’s work. Someone who only conducts replication studies would run the risk of not meeting the current requirements to become...

Update February 3: I added a Twitter response made by the first author. In the commentary section a comment by the second author. I just submitted my review of the manuscript Experimental Design and the Reliability of Priming Effects: Reconsidering the "Train Wreck" by Rivers and Sherman. Here it is. The authors start with two important observations. First, semantic priming experiments yield robust effects, whereas “social priming” (I’m following the authors’ convention of using quotation marks here) experiments do not. Second, semantic priming experiments use within-subjects designs, whereas “social priming” experiments use between-subjects designs. The authors are right in pointing out that this latter fact has not received sufficient attention. The authors’ goal is to demonstrate that the second fact is the cause of the first. Here is how they summarize their results in the abstract: “These results indicate that the key difference between priming effects identifi...

A number of years ago, my colleagues Peter Verkoeijen, Katinka Dijkstra, several undergraduate students, and I conducted a replication of Experiment 5 of Kidd & Castano (2013). In that study, published in Science,  participants were exposed to an excerpt from either literary fiction or from non-literary fiction. Kidd and Castano hypothesized that brief exposure to literary fiction as opposed to non-literary fiction would enhance empathy in people because of the greater psychological finesse in literary novels than in non-literary novels. Anyone who has read, say, Proust as well as Michael Crichton will probably intuit what Kidd and Castano were getting at. Their results showed indeed that people who had been briefly exposed to the literary excerpt showed more empathy in Theory of Mind (ToM) tests than participants who had been briefly exposed to the non-literary excerpt. Because the study touches on some of our own interests, text comprehension, literature, empathy and be...

A while back, Lorne Campbell wrote a blog post  listing the preregistered publications from his lab. This is a great idea. It is easy to talk the talk, but it’s harder to walk the walk. So under the notion that we don't want to be all hat and no cattle, I rounded up some replications and preregistered original papers that I co-authored. First the replications. I find performing replications very insightful. My role in two of the RRRs listed below (verbal overshadowing and facial feedback) was rather minor but the 2016 RRR and the issues surrounding it, on which I've blogged  before, felt like an onslaught. The 2012 replication study was used to iron out an inconsistency in the literature. An additional replication study is close to getting accepted and will be added to the list in an update. These days I use direct replications primarily when I want to build on work by others. As per Richard Feynman, before we move on we first need to attempt a direct replication...