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This site aggregates blogs and popular press articles about personality psychology. If you are an ARP member who writes a blog, or whose research has been featured in a recent popular press article, email us at personalitymetablog@gmail.com to have your work added to the meta-blog.-
Recent Posts
- Personality and Sheltering-in-place during the Pandemic – David Funder (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
- Who Supports Freedom of Speech? Tolerance vs. Prejudice – David Funder (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
- Who Uses Drugs and Why? – David Funder (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
- Why Religious People are Less Likely to Own Cats – David Funder (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
- Thoughts on “Ego Depletion” and Some Related Issues Concerning Replication – David Funder (funderstorms)
- The Real and Fake Faces of Personality’s ‘Big One’ – David Funder (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
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Links to Contributing Blogs
- citation needed by Tal Yarkoni
- funderstorms by David Funder
- Person X Situation by Carol Tweten
- pigee by Brent Roberts
- Psych Your Mind coordinated by Michael Kraus
- Secrets of Longevity by Howard Friedman
- Sherman's Head by Ryne Sherman
- sometimes i'm wrong by Simine Vazire
- The Desk Reject Recent content on The Desk Reject
- The Hardest Science by Sanjay Srivastava
- The personality sentences by Jonathan Gerber
- The Trait-State Continuum by Brent Donnellan
- Unique—Like Everybody Else by Scott McGreal
Association for Research in Personality
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Monthly Archives: September 2013
Dogmatism and Openness to Experience in the Non-Religious – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
Dogmatism is usually associated with low levels of openness to experience, particularly among the religious. A study on the non-religious found that among atheists higher levels of openness to experience were actually associated with greater dogmatism, particularly if they had a strong social identity as atheists.
Comments Off on Dogmatism and Openness to Experience in the Non-Religious – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
Posted in Unique—Like Everybody Else
Tagged personality
SWAG: My favorite reason to "Just Post It!" – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
In last week's journal club we read about a recent paper in Psychological Science with a very clear message: It should be the norm for researchers to post their data upon publication. In the article, the author (Uri Simonsohn) lays out the major reason why he thinks posting data is a good idea: It helps our field catch scientific fraud in action (e.g., fabricated data). Simonsohn details some methods he has used in the past to catch fraud in the paper and on his new blog over at datacolada.org (I'll have mine blended!).
I agree that posting data will make it harder for people to fabricate data. However, my favorite reason to increase norms for posting data has nothing to do with data fabrication.
Read More->
Comments Off on SWAG: My favorite reason to "Just Post It!" – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Posted in Psych Your Mind
Tagged Michael, research ethics, research methods
The hotness-IQ tradeoff in academia – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)
The other day I came across a blog post ranking academic fields by hotness. Important data for sure. But something about it was gnawing on me for a while, some connection I wasn’t quite making.
And then it hit me. The rankings looked an awful lot like another list I’d once seen of academic fields ranked by intelligence. Only, you know, upside-down.
Sure enough, when I ran the correlation among the fields that appear on both lists, it came out at r = -.45.
I don’t know what this means, but it seems important. Maybe a mathematician or computer scientist can help me understand it.
Continue readingComments Off on The hotness-IQ tradeoff in academia – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)
Posted in The Hardest Science
I’m moving to Austin! – Tal Yarkoni ([citation needed])
The title pretty much says it. After spending four great years in Colorado, I’m happy to say that I’ll be moving to Austin at the end of the month. I’ll be joining the Department of Psychology at UT-Austin as a Research Associate, where I plan to continue dabbling in all things psychological and informatic, but with less snow and more air conditioning.
While my new position nominally has the same title as my old one, the new one’s a bit unusual in that the funding is coming from two quite different sources. Half of it comes from my existing NIH grant for development of the Neurosynth framework, which means that half of my time will be spent more or less the same way I’m spending it now–namely, on building tools to improve and automate the large-scale synthesis of functional MRI data. (Incidentally, I’ll be hiring a software developer and/or postdoc in the very near future, so drop me a line if you think you might be interested.)
The other half of the funding is tied to the PsyHorns course developed by Jamie Pennebaker and Sam Gosling over the past few years. PsyHorns is a synchronous massive online course (SMOC) that lets anyone in the world with an internet connection (okay, and $550 in loose change lying around) take an introductory psychology class via the internet and officially receive credit for it from the University of Texas (this recent WSJ article on PsyHorns provides some more details). My role will be to serve as a bridge between the psychologists and the developers–which means I’ll have an eclectic assortment of duties like writing algorithms to detect cheating, developing tools to predict how well people are doing in the class, mining the gigantic reams of data we’re acquiring, developing ideas for new course features, and, of course, publishing papers.
Naturally, the PILab will be joining me in my southern adventure. Since the PILab currently only has one permanent member (guess who?), and otherwise consists of a single Mac Pro workstation, this latter move involves much less effort than you might think (though it does mean I’ll have to change the lab website’s URL, logo, and–horror of horrors–color scheme). Continue reading
Comments Off on I’m moving to Austin! – Tal Yarkoni ([citation needed])
Posted in citation needed
A Single Factor Model for Success in Graduate School – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
 |
| Graduate School: The Playground of the Mind |
But, what if I told you that success in graduate school is much simpler than considering all these complex person X situation interactions? What if whether you sink or swim is really just about one key ingredient? Today I present a single factor model for success in graduate school!
Read More->
Comments Off on A Single Factor Model for Success in Graduate School – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Posted in Psych Your Mind
Tagged Michael, scientific writing
Individual Differences in the Stanford Prison Experiment – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
The Stanford Prison Experiment has long been held up as an example of the power of strong situations to overcome individual differences in personality and choices. The SPE not only did NOT show this, it was not even an adequate test of such a claim. People can still make personal choices even in tough situations.
Comments Off on Individual Differences in the Stanford Prison Experiment – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)
Posted in Unique—Like Everybody Else
Tagged individual differences, personality
The flawed logic of chasing large effects with small samples – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)
“I don’t care about any effect that I need more than 20 subjects per cell to detect.”
I have heard statements to this effect a number of times over the years. Sometimes from the mouths of some pretty well-established researchers, and sometimes from people quoting the well-established researchers they trained under. The idea is that if an effect is big enough — perhaps because of its real-world importance, or because of the experimenter’s skill in isolating and amplifying the effect in the lab — then you don’t need a big sample to detect it.
When I have asked people why they think that, the reasoning behind it goes something like this. If the true effect is large, then even a small sample will have a reasonable chance of detecting it. (“Detecting” = rejecting the null in this context.) If the true effect is small, then a small sample is unlikely to reject the null. So if you only use small samples, you will limit yourself to detecting large effects. And if that’s all you care about detecting, then you’re fine with small samples.
On first consideration, that might sound reasonable, and even admirably aware of issues of statistical power. Unfortunately it is completely wrong. Continue reading
Comments Off on The flawed logic of chasing large effects with small samples – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)
Posted in The Hardest Science
Don’t blame Milgram – David Funder (funderstorms)
I’m motivated to write this post because of a new book that, according to an NPR interview with its author, attacks the late Stanley Milgram for having misled us about the human propensity to obey. He overstated his case, she claims, and also conducted unethical research.
The Milgram obedience studies of the 1960’s are probably the most famous research in the history of social psychology. As the reader almost certainly knows, subjects were ordered to give apparently harmful – perhaps even fatal – electric shocks to an innocent victim (who was, fortunately, an unharmed research assistant). The studies found that a surprising number of ordinary people followed orders to the hilt .
Accounts of these studies in textbooks and in popular writings usually make one of two points, and often both. (1) Milgram showed that anybody, or almost anybody, would obey orders to harm an innocent victim if the orders came from someone in an apparent position of authority. (2) Milgram showed that the “power of the situation” overwhelms the “power of the person”; the experimenter’s orders were so strong that they overwhelmed personal dispositions and individual differences. Both of these points are, indeed, dead wrong. But their promulgation is not Milgram’s fault.
Consider each point, and what Milgram said (or didn’t say) about them. Continue reading
Comments Off on Don’t blame Milgram – David Funder (funderstorms)
Posted in funderstorms