Simine Vazire

Academics love awards. We give out career awards, mid-career awards, early-career awards. We give out awards for the best paper, the best theory, the best teaching, the best service. But what function do all those awards serve? And are we the better for having them? In this episode we talk about how awards fit into the academic ecosystem. How do recipients benefit from them? How do they help the organizations and research communities that give them out? What kinds of biases are baked into the system, and how can we counteract them? Should we consider radically changing how academic awards work, or even doing away with them? Plus: We answer a letter about why academia and policy research have such different norms around checking their numbers. 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 84. It was recorded on September 2/3 (US/AUS), 2020.

Robb Willer and Simine Vazire join the podcast to debate whether social science, in its current form, can usefully contribute to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Is psychology ready to give trustworthy advice to policy-makers? Plus: Yoel shirks his beer-drinking, yet again. Special Guests: Robb Willer and Simine Vazire. Sponsored By: The Great Courses Plus : The Great Courses Plus is a Video-On-Demand service brought to you by The Great Courses – the leading global media brand for lifelong learning and personal enrichment. With thousands of in-depth videos taught by the world’s greatest professors, you’ll always have something fascinating to learn about. Promo Code: BEERS Links: GRIFTER PALE --The Grifter Brewing Co Royal Canadian Mead Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response | Nature Human Behaviour Is Social and Behavioural Science Evidence Ready for Application and Dissemination? PsyArXiv Preprints | Where Are The Self-Correcting Mechanisms In Science?

The contact hypothesis is an old idea in social psychology. It posits that under the right circumstances, bringing people from different groups together can reduce prejudice. In this episode, we discuss a new field experiment by Salma Mousa testing whether putting Iraqi Christians and Muslims on soccer teams together can rebuild social cohesion after war. Part of our conversation focuses on the direct implications of this work for the contact hypothesis. We also discuss how this study stands out against some common patterns in social science research. Why, despite the long history of research and intuitive appeal of the contact hypothesis, have no studies like this been done before? How did this paper benefit from integrating rigorous quantitative methods with a careful understanding of history and context? How did a commitment to not just the letter, but also the spirit, of preregistration keep the conclusions aligned so well with the data? Plus: We answer a letter about whether the COVID pandemic means this is an especially bad time to start a Ph.D. program. Links: Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq , by Salma Mousa Can playing together help us live together? Commentary by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Chelsey Clark Twitter thread by Betsy Paluck 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 83. It was recorded on August 19/20 (US/AUS), 2020.

Scientific journal articles have a lot of numbers. Scientists are smart people with even smarter computers, so an outsider might think that, if nothing else, you can count on the math checking out. But modern data analysis is complicated, and computational reproducibility is far from guaranteed. In this episode, we discuss a recent set of articles published at the journal Cortex . A group of authors set out to replicate an influential 2010 article that claimed that if you reactivate a fear-laden memory, it becomes possible to change the emotional association - something with clear relevance to clinical practice. Along the way, the replicating scientists encountered anomalies which led them to try to reproduce the analyses in the original study - and they discovered that they could not. We talk about what this means for science. What are the implications of knowing that for a nontrivial number if scientific studies, the math doesn't add up? Will a new era of open data and open code be enough to fix the problem? How much will Verification Reports - a new publication format that Cortex has introduced - help with that process? Plus: We answer a letter about swinging for the fences when your dream job comes up but you don't feel ready yet. Links: The three R's of scientific integrity: Replicability, reproducibility, and robustness , by Robert McIntosh and Chris Chambers The Validity of the Tool “statcheck” in Discovering Statistical Reporting Inconsistencies , by Michèle Nuijten et al Analytic reproducibility in articles receiving open data badges at Psychological Science: An observational study , by Tom Hardwicke et al 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 82. It was recorded on August 10, 2020.

How does psychology's response to the replication crisis fit into a broader history of science? In this episode we discuss a paper by sociologists Jeremy Freese and David Peterson that takes on that question. Are "epistemic activists" in psychology redefining what it means to be objective in science? Does a focus on reforming incentives mean we view scientists as economic actors for whom motives and dispositions are irrelevant? Does the last decade's growth in meta-research mean that meta-analysis is the new arbiter of objectivity? Does a shift to a systems perspective on science have parallels in other systemic analyses of institutions? Plus: We answer a letter about whether raising new concerns when you're reviewing a revision is obligatory, a jerk move, or both. Links: Freese & Peterson (2018). The Emergence of Statistical Objectivity: Changing Ideas of Epistemic Vice and Virtue in Science. DOI , full text Twitter discussion about positionality statements in quant papers White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism , by Robin DiAngelo Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry , by Helen Longino. 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 81. It was recorded on July 22, 2020.

The upcoming academic term will be unusual, to say the least. The global pandemic led to emergency shutdowns in March, and it is likely that many colleges and universities will continue teaching partially or wholly online. And protests against anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere have led to institutional statements about taking an antiracist stand - which may or may not translate into real change. In this episode, we discuss some of the changes and how we are thinking about them in our work. How did we adapt our teaching for remote learning, and what do we think fall will look like? What changes can we make to our teaching and service to be more antiracist? How can we stay focused and motivated when we're acting as individuals against systemic problems? Plus, we answer a letter about working in the lab of your more senior and prominent partner. Simine chides her co-hosts over ignoring Southern Hemisphere seasons (and the one who writes episode titles promises to try harder, right after he gets this one pun out of his system). And Sanjay talks about coping with grief under social distancing. 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 80. It was recorded on July 8, 2020.

Scientific knowledge is always contingent and uncertain, even when it's the best we have. Should that factor into how we communicate science to the public, and if so, how? We discuss a recent article about the effects of communicating uncertainty on people's trust in scientific findings and scientists. When should and shouldn't scientists communicate uncertainty, and how should they do it? How should scientists prioritize keeping people's trust versus being up front about what they don't know? What are the different sources of uncertainty in scientific knowledge, and how should scientists deal with all of them? Plus, we get a followup letter from someone who asked about career support for a nonacademic partner - and they share what they learned and how things worked out. Link: The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers , by Anne Marthe van der Bles et al. 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 79. It was recorded on April 27, 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating major and serious disruptions to just about everything, and higher education is no exception. In this episode we talk about how our work has been affected by measures to slow down the coronavirus. How have we adjusted to remote teaching? What effects have the social distancing measures had on our research? How are we mentoring students in light of such an uncertain future? What bigger changes and disruptions could be in store for academia? Plus: We answer a letter about when and how students should draw on their expertise when their advisor is in a different discipline. 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 78. It was recorded on April 7, 2020.

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about public trust in science - how much there is, in what ways, whether we deserve it or not. In this episode, we discuss an article by historian and philosopher Rachel Ankeny that asks whether "trust" is even the right concept to be talking about. What does it mean to trust an abstraction like "science"? When people argue about trust in science, are they even talking about the same thing - the findings, the people, the process, or something else? And we discuss Ankeny's proposed alternative: that instead of the public's trust, scientists should be seeking out engagement . What would an engagement model looks like? How would engagement benefit the public? How would it benefit science? And what about people who just wouldn't want to engage? Plus: We answer a letter from someone who likes, but doesn't love, teaching, and wants to know if that's good enough for academia. Links: How The Pandemic Will End , by Ed Yong in The Atlantic A comment on Everett et al. (2020): No evidence for the effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioural intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic , by Farid Anvari. (Note: After we recorded the episode, the authors of the original paper updated it and then invited Farid to join them as a co-author. A great outcome!) The Taboo Against Explicit Causal Inference in Nonexperimental Psychology , by Michael Grosz, Julia Rohrer, and Felix Thoemmes Science in an age of scepticism , by Rachel Ankeny in Griffith Review 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 77. It was recorded on March 26, 2020.

Many important questions about cause and effect are impractical to answer with a randomized experiment. What should we do instead? In this episode we talk about doing causal inference with observational data. Has psychology's historical obsession with internal validity led it, ironically, to think about causal inference in an unsophisticated way? Can formal analytic tools like directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) tell us how to do better studies? Or is their main lesson don't bother trying? How do norms and incentives in publishing help or hurt in doing better causal inference? Plus: We answer a letter about applying to psychology grad school when your background is in data science. Links: Thinking Clearly About Correlations and Causation: Graphical Causal Models for Observational Data , by Julia M. Rohrer That one weird third variable problem nobody ever mentions: Conditioning on a collider , by Julia Rohrer The selection-distortion effect: How selection changes correlations in surprising ways , by Sanjay Srivastava 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 76. It was recorded on March 16, 2020.

The path from theory to study consists of a thousand decisions, big and small. How and how much do these decisions matter? We discuss a recent crowdsourced meta-study that tried to find out. Fifteen teams of researchers were given 5 different hypotheses and told to design a study to test them, then they ran all the studies and got widely varying results. What are the implications of this study for how we should think about the role of theory in study design? What does it say about the different functions of direct and conceptual replications? Is this evidence of hidden moderators? How predictable were the differences in results, and were they predictable because of differences in the study designers' expertise, biases, or something else? Plus: We answer a letter about getting scooped on a systematic review. Links: Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results by Landy et al. in Psychological Bulletin 200 researchers, 5 hypotheses, no consistent answers . Coverage at Wired by Christie Aschwanden 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 , on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/ , and on instagram at @blackgoatpod . You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com . You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher . Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver . This is episode 75. It was recorded on January 30, 2020.

Is the “business-as-usual” approach to science in crisis? Does the public have a good grasp of how scientific knowledge is really generated? And might scientists be as much prey to self-serving biases as the rest of us mortals? Simine Vazire joins Igor and Charles to discuss the thorny complexity of seeking reliable knowledge about the world and about ourselves, the perils of being a whistleblower in the competitive world of modern science, and the on-going scientific credibility revolution. We discuss meta-scientists, the Open Science movement, and the power of preprints to bust open the black box of peer review. Igor tries to unpack the dialectic of motives among the ‘data policemen,’ Simine issues a call-to-arms for a grassroots-powered future for the scientific community, and Charles learns that the planet of self-knowledge is in a galaxy still far, far away. Welcome to Episode 25. Special Guest: Simine Vazire. Links: Simine Vazire Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong - Vox False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant - Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, 2011 Let’s Add Kindness to Science - Shira Gabriel - Medium The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science Psychology's Replication Crisis Is Real, Many Labs 2 Says - The Atlantic Daryl Bem proved ESP is real. Which means science is broken - Slate Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. - PubMed - NCBI Most Americans trust military, scientists to act in public interest | Pew Research Center The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study | The BMJ <a title="From Protoscience to Proper Science: The Path ahead for Psychology | Science | The Guardian" rel="n