Psychology is generally Continuous, not Categorical
We live in a world where we often have to make categorical decisions. We date someone or we don’t. We marry them or we don’t. We hire someone or we don’t. We pick either the Democrat or the Republican. There is no middle ground.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t necessarily organized in that fashion. Few would believe [...]
Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
Presented in the context of bringing together consilience from outside of psychology, a friend of mine sent me the below TED video, by Simon Sinek, which I believe has a lot in common with what much of psychology is discovering, specifically that intrinsic gut-level motivations are much more powerful than extrinsic rational motivations. In some ways, much [...]
Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data
Thanks to the publicity which moral psychology (and specifically Jon Haidt’s work) has begun to receive, along with the average person’s insatiable appetite for knowledge about themselves, facilitated by the internet, we have collected a truly unique dataset at yourmorals.org. It is a large community sample and includes some reaction time data. It is non-representative [...]
Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is no. For the last week, I’ve been attempting to update a ‘candidate calculator’ website that I helped create for the 2008 presidential election, votehelp.org. Candidate calculators are a term for quizzes or surveys which ask you questions about issues (sometimes weighted by issue importance) and then match you with [...]
How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations
I have recently been following a discussion in my discipline about the peer review process, which led me to this very interesting paper about the history of and alternatives to the peer review process in psychology.
At the same time, I’ve been working with colleagues on a paper about experiential vs. material purchasing styles, for which [...]
Can liberal academics study conservative ideology?
Recently, Jon Haidt gave a talk at the main social psychology conference about the statistically impossible lack of diversity in social psychology, meaning that the vast majority of social psychologists are liberal, with a smattering of libertarians or moderates and close to zero self-identified conservatives. This talk was covered in this New York Times [...]