Monthly Archives: April 2014

the question came up a few weeks ago: if two measures are correlated .60, should they be aggregated into a single measure or kept separate?  this might seem like a narrow question, but it raises some deep and complicated issues.  at the heart of the matter is: when are two measures measuring the same construct?

 

thinking about this reminded me of the jingle and jangle fallacies.  i have not read the original papers (the jingle fallacy apparently dates back to edward thorndike, 1904, and the jangle fallacy to truman kelley, 1927.  i have not tracked down either book/paper.  sorry.) the jingle fallacy is calling two things by the same name that are actually different constructs.  the jangle fallacy is using two different names for things that are actually the same construct.

 

let's get specific.  let's take the constructs 'neuroticism' and 'negative affect'.  are these two the same thing? (maybe, maybe not).

one obvious difference is that neuroticism is usually thought of as a stable personality trait, whereas negative affect is typically thought of as a momentary state. Continue reading →

someone recently asked my why i do what i do.  it's easy to come up with just-so stories. for all i know, i could just as easily have ended up inventing new ice cream flavors for tara's ice cream (i still haven't ruled it out).  and if i had, i could probably make up a story about why it was always meant to be.  narratives are deceptively easy to construct, and amazingly convincing after the fact. it would be especially ironic for a self-knowledge researcher to deceive herself about why she studies self-knowledge.  so i mostly try to resist giving an explanation.  but then there's this:

this is a note from my best friend, written when we were 15. (i have honored her request to remain anonymous -- she undoubtedly has much more embarrasing material on me.)

a few excerpts:

'at miriam's birthday party, i got the idea that you wanted an honest evaluation from me about you.'

Continue reading →

 

'those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship,
for to undertake to wound and offend a man for his own good
is to have a healthy love for him.'

-michel de montaigne*

(all this time, reviewers were just expressing their healthy love for me!)

today i am going to talk about self-deception. don't worry, i will connect it back to scientific integrity.

being a researcher who studies self-knowledge and self-deception is a little nerve-wracking.  watching other people delude themselves and be entirely convinced by their self-deception, you start to wonder whether all of your own self-beliefs might not also be delusional. it can make a person paranoid. so i started wondering, could there be an internal marker of self-deception? a red flag that, if trained, one could detect and catch oneself in the act of self-deception? Continue reading →

i learned a new word the other day. bucketing. it almost made me cry.

one of the most common mistakes i see when reviewing papers is authors who take a continuous variable and, for no good reason, mutilate it by turning it into a categorical variable. our old friend the median split is one example.  (whose idea was it to befriend the median split? and why won’t he stop harassing us?)

bucketing, from what i can tell, is another such technique.  i had a hard time finding a definition, but i think it’s basically creating categories out of multiple response options and grouping the data that way. for example, you can turn the continuous variable ‘age’ into a categorical variable by categorizing people into age ‘buckets’ (e.g, 20-29, 30-39, etc.). Continue reading →