In 2012, Rink Hoekstra received two emails on the same day. One was from a journal editor, telling him that a manuscript was being rejected based on the recommendations of two reviewers. The other was from one of those reviewers, complimenting the paper and congratulating him on a job well done. The reviewer, Fiona Fidler, discovered that her review had been altered, and Rink and Fiona teamed out to figure out why. We spoke with Rink in 2018 about what happened, but we held on to the...

Academics are under enormous stress right now, raising the possibility of a rising rate of burnout. Longtime structural trends in higher education have increased pressures for demonstrable productivity. On top of that are a global pandemic, resistance and backlash to calls for racial justice, and unstable politics in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere. In this episode we discuss burnout in academia. We focus on an emerging perspective from the healthcare field that describes burnout as...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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?...

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...

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...

How important is expertise in conducting replications? Many Labs 4 was a large, multi-lab effort that brought together 21 labs, running 2,220 subjects, to study that question. The goal was to compare replications with and without the involvement of the original authors to see if that made a difference. But things got complicated when the effect they chose to study - the mortality salience effect that is a cornerstone of terror management theory - could not be replicated by anyone. In this...

The Graduate Record Exam - the GRE - is widely used in graduate school admissions. In recent years however, a number of graduate programs, including a few in psychology, have stopped requiring it in a movement that has been dubbed "GRExit." In this episode we discuss the arguments around using the GRE in graduate admissions. What is the evidence for and against its validity? For and against the presence of bias against various groups? How much do we know about validity and bias in the other...

In our annual end-of-year episode, we talk about noteworthy reflections and events from the year that just passed. Alexa reflects on breakups, and wonders why we don't take them more seriously as a significant disruption to other people's lives. Sanjay talks about hitting a low point and deciding to finally do something about it. And Simine talks about starting a new relationship and finding a new job that will take her halfway around the world. Plus: we answer a letter about whether...

Peer review is a major part of how science works today. In this episode we talk about how we approach doing peer reviews. How do you distinguish between differences in approach or preference - "I would have done it a different way" - versus things that you should treat as objections? How much weight do you put on different considerations - the importance of the research question, the novelty, the theory, the methods, the results, and other factors? What's your actual process - do you read...

To get your PhD you have to do a dissertation. For some this is an important product that demonstrates your ability to produce original research. To others, it's a vestigial ritual and a waste of time on the way to becoming a productive scholar. In this episode we discuss dissertations - what they've been in the past, what they are today, and where they might go in the future. Is a dissertation necessary for the kinds of work that someone might do with a PhD? As graduate training has evolved,...

Speaking up about injustice and bad behavior in a professional setting - as a witness, or as the target of it - is hard. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, and it can generate backlash and other risks for yourself and your career. In this episode, we talk about that moment when people finally decide to say something or do something. Simine shares the story of how she decided to go on the record about being groped at a conference - what brought her to that decision, and what happened as a...

Academics give a lot of talks. Job talks, conference talks, colloquium talks, brownbag talks, pub talks. In this episode we talk about talks. How do you approach different audiences and formats? How do you manage a format or audience where interrupting with questions is the norm? How, and how much, do you prepare for different kinds of talks? How do you handle nerves when the stakes feel high? We share some of our own observations and experiences about giving academic presentations. Plus: We...

Scientists have to follow a lot of rules. We have IRB rules, journal submission rules, university rules - lots of rules. But some of the most important rules in science aren't rules at all - they are norms. Guiding principles that shape the work we do. In this episode, we discuss a classic paper by the sociologist Robert Merton on 4 norms that govern scientific work. Are these norms an expression of scientific values, or just a means to an end? How well do scientists follow them, individually...

In a previous episode we talked about making small talk in academic life and in general. In this episode we continue the theme, taking a break from our usual Very Serious Topics to answer the ultimate small-talk question: What do you do for fun? We talk about what a week in our lives is like outside of work. How do we spend time when we're not "on the clock"? What is the right amount of socializing? (spoiler: not everybody has the same answer) How do our hobbies and avocations reflect back on...

The three pillars of academic work are research, teaching, and service - in that order. But service is incredibly important for universities and professions to function well and for academics to contribute to their communities. In this episode we talk about how we think about service. How do decide what service to do, and how much? How do you manage service in relation to your other work? What are different kinds of service, and what do you get out of them? What should we do about colleagues...

In the past decade, scientists in psychology and elsewhere have changed a lot in how we evaluate what makes research replicable, robust, and credible. New theories and findings in metascience and methodology - and repopularization of old ones - have given us new ways to think critically about research. But what do we do when these concepts and arguments are used poorly or bad faith - applied wrongly or selectively, or misused to sow broad doubt in science? In this episode we talk about what...

Part of academic life means talking to new people about yourself and your work - whether it's on a job interview, at a conference, or casual conversations outside of academic settings. In this episode we talk about talking to strangers. How do you answer default academic small-talk questions like "tell me about your work?" How do you shake out of them to move a conversation somewhere more interesting? Should you prepare or practice an elevator pitch? And when, if ever, is it safe to take off...