Social Psychology Without Social Interaction HEAD TOPICS
Social Psychology Without Social Interaction
10/22/2022 12:19:00 AM A recipe for failure
Source Psychology Today
When RoyFBaumeister and colleagues set out to find out why so few psych studies are replicable, a moment of inspiration made him scrap the research and do it all over. 'To us, it was a bombshell.' Here's what he found out. A recipe for failure Multi-site replications in social psychology are much more successful when they include live social interaction.Perhaps the social being is not fully activated when a research participant sits alone making ratings on a computer.This is a story of how a last-minute idea (and the surprising result that emerged from the new codings) transformed a paper. It’s never too late to stop thinking! Seeking to understand social psychology’s replication brouhaha, two colleagues and I reviewed all the published multi-lab replications in social psychology. We had finished the manuscript, polished it, revised it, and gone through the process of submitting it for journal publication. I was thinking, whew, that was a big job, glad it’s done for now. But then something else occurred to me. We ended up going back and coding all the studies again, running another analysis, and having to ask the editor to replace the submitted version with a revised version. To us, it was a bombshell. Read more:
Psychology Today » Factors Other Than Breed That Predict Aggression in Dogs Social Security Administration makes it easier to change sex marker in records Social Security makes it easier to change sex marker in records Social Security allows Americans to pick new gender Get to know Cindy Hsu
We're getting to know our very own Cindy Hsu a little better with a series of rapid-fire questions. Read more >> Factors Other Than Breed That Predict Aggression in Dogs'If we are to fully understand canine aggression, we must look beyond just the dog's breed and consider its environment, degree of training, and social interactions with the humans that it lives with,' explains StanleyCoren StanleyCoren I used to be a little prejudiced against pit bulls. I have friends who have members of that breed that are just big, lovable sweethearts. It's all about how dogs are treated. There is always a mean spirited person behind a vicious dog. Social Security Administration makes it easier to change sex marker in recordsThe Social Security Administration said it will now allow people to change the sex marker on their Social Security number record without providing documentation of their sex designation. Ridiculous and dangerous World has gone insane. And, since, actuarially, women live longer, such a switch can lead to increased benefits. Social Security makes it easier to change sex marker in recordsThe Social Security Administration (SSA) said it will now allow people to change the sex marker on their Social Security number record without providing documentation of their sex designation. The change went into effect immediately. More Democrat policies ... More fraud Awful Social Security allows Americans to pick new genderAmericans can now select a new gender in their Social Security records without having to submit any medical or legal proof that they have switched their sex designation. This affects you how? F’ed up world! I’m an armadillo Christina Aguilera Releases Powerful New ‘Beautiful’ Music Video Focused On The Impact Of Social Media On TeensChristina Aguilera’s new ‘Beautiful’ video addresses social media’s negative impact on mental health Opinion The Biggest Midterm Election Issue Is ChaosFrom WSJopinion: Most voters, especially the independents trending rightward, don’t like chaos. To ride it out, voters can choose between a red wave or a blue wave, writes DanHenninger. opinion DanHenninger Wow opinion DanHenninger Ballsy to write that first paragraph right after seeing how Republican policies fared in the UK. opinion DanHenninger Wow so much engagement must mean such an insightful piece!! LOL zero comments murdochsucks A review of multi-site replications revealed a surprise about which studies replicated successfully.Key points Most recent investigations of aggressive tendencies in dogs have focused on breed and genetic factors.it will now allow people to change the sex marker on their Social Security number record without providing documentation of their sex designation.it will now allow people to change the sex marker on their Social Security number record without providing documentation of their sex designation. Multi-site replications in social psychology are much more successful when they include live social interaction. Perhaps the social being is not fully activated when a research participant sits alone making ratings on a computer. Social interactions with the owner, training, and living environment are important in determining canine aggressive tendencies. This is a story of how a last-minute idea (and the surprising result that emerged from the new codings) transformed a paper. Prior to the announcement, people could not change their sex marker solely with self-attestation. It’s never too late to stop thinking! Seeking to understand social psychology’s replication brouhaha, two colleagues and I reviewed all the published multi-lab replications in social psychology. In recent years, much of the research looking at dog aggression has focused on differences among dog breeds or other genetic factors. We had finished the manuscript, polished it, revised it, and gone through the process of submitting it for journal publication.S. I was thinking, whew, that was a big job, glad it’s done for now. Confirming this belief is a new study out of Brazil from a team of investigators headed by Flavio Ayrosa at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of São Paulo. passport or amended state-issued birth certificate, or with a court order or medical certification of gender transition. But then something else occurred to me. We ended up going back and coding all the studies again, running another analysis, and having to ask the editor to replace the submitted version with a revised version. There were a variety of different dog breeds in the study sample, along with many mixed breeds. To us, it was a bombshell. However, if a person changes their sex marker, they will need to apply for a replacement SSN card, the SSA said. Here’s what struck me. Each participant received a set of questionnaires. While the SSA is currently only allowing for the sex designation to be changed to either male or female, the agency is "exploring possible future policy and systems updates to support an 'X' sex designation for the SSN card application process. My own graduate training emphasized that the way to conduct a good experiment in social psychology involved setting up a situation that would be highly engaging with the participant, based on ongoing interaction between the experimenter and the participant (and sometimes a confederate). Live, carefully staged interpersonal interactions were the norm in social psychology for decades. In addition, the owners filled out the aggression sections from the C-BARQ inventory (a behaviorally validated and commonly used measure of dog behavior).S. Indeed, some of the best experimenters I knew had had theater training, because it helped them understand how to get the audience (the research subject) into having the intended experience and reaction. Good acting succeeds at sending the emotional message, and good social psychology experimenting thrived based on the same. There were a lot of data generated by this study, and there were some complex statistical analyses involved; however, there are some highlights that are significant and are easily summarized. Some graduate training programs (mine included) would encourage the Ph. The removal of barriers for sex marker changes on official government records comes during a contentious political and social climate for transgender and gender non-conforming Americans. Story continues The removal of barriers for sex marker changes on official government records comes during a contentious political and social climate for transgender and gender non-conforming Americans. D. One of the most significant was a tendency for the dog's weight to predict aggression directed toward the dog's owner. students to take an acting lesson or two on their way to their psychology Ph.D.2 pounds) of weight. More recently, however, researchers have abandoned this live-interaction style of research in favor of having research subjects sit at computers and make ratings. The gradual disappearance of behavior from behavioral science has been widely remarked (e. A dog's head shape was also found to be a predictor of aggression. g., Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007). The dog's also was a factor. The pressure to run larger and larger samples has contributed greatly to this shift. If we think of Milgram’s obedience studies, for example — with an experimenter plus a paid confederate spending over an hour with each participant to get one data point — we can readily see how difficult it would be to do this with several hundred participants. Effects of Environment, Living Conditions, and Social Interactions While head shape and size are often characteristic of specific breeds, this research uncovered a number of variables that are not breed-related but that also predicted various aspects of canine aggressive behavior. In contrast, getting a couple hundred people to do an online survey is much easier and hence more efficient. I wondered how much this affected the multi-site replications. The researchers found that the dog owner's was related to stranger-directed aggression. So we went back and coded all 36 studies into three categories: A few did have live interactions, even if these were just that the experimenter interacted with the participant throughout the session. There was an intermediate category of computer-mediated or computer-simulated interpersonal interactions. And then the no-interaction category, which was by far the most common: Data collection involved the participant being alone or responding alone, at a computer or workstation, in a cubicle, in some cases in a large room with plenty of other participants silently and separately doing the same study. It turns out that live interaction makes a huge difference. Most of the replication attempts were failures — yet none of the failures involved live interaction. Not one. The correlation between successful replication and having live interaction was a whopping r=.7. Indeed, the single most successful replication out of the 36 was also the only one to have live, unscripted social interaction. (It was most successful in that it not only yielded significant support for the original finding but also reproduced the original effect size; Ito et al., 2019). To me, this underscores the conclusion that multi-site replications often get null results because they fail to engage the research participant as a human being. When talking and interacting with a live human being who is physically present, people respond — emotionally, motivationally, and in other ways. When sitting alone in a cubicle making ratings, their reactions are muted. And hence so are the data they furnish. This is a bigger problem for social psychology than for other fields. The phenomena other areas study depend much less on getting the person responding fully as a social being. There may be an important point about human nature here. Much of the human psyche is shaped by evolution for live social interaction. The influential French historian Philippe Aries famously asserted that until the 17th century, no one was ever left alone. (No doubt an exaggeration, but still broadly correct.) When you are dealing with real other people in the same room your emotions, cognitions, and motivations are all active. In sharp contrast, when you are alone with a computer, the emotions and motivations (at least) are muted. Social psychology experiments sharply lose power when they relinquish real social interaction. John Bargh has talked about the change in social psychology. As he nicely put it, the field switched what it relied on for power in research. Early work, including the Milgram obedience studies, looked to the power of the situation. Modern studies have shifted to emphasize statistical power, which translates into getting data from lots and lots of people. Instead of trying to engineer a high-impact live interaction that will get people involved, we go for having large numbers of people furnish data. In practice, it means having lots of people sit at computers and make ratings. There are some important reasons for making that shift. Still, it seems that there is a cost of minimizing the “social” part of social psychology. I suspect the roots of this go back to evolution. Humankind evolved to deal with live human beings, and in such situations mind and body come alive. In contrast, there is little evolutionary preparation for motivation and emotion to be galvanized when someone sits alone at a computer. To forestall misunderstandings: I do not object to research that relies on people sitting alone at a computer making ratings. There is much to be learned that way. But when it becomes the main research method in social psychology, then something is lost, and many possibilities for scientific advancement are curtailed. In other words, I don’t have a problem with what social psychologists are doing — my problem is with what we are not doing. The glory years of social psychology were marked by a large diversity of methods. Crucially, the sense was that we should study every phenomenon with the best methods available for that topic. That’s what I still think is the best. But today’s psychologists feel pressure to use the same methods, and therefore many phenomena simply cannot be studied. Unfortunately, that includes most live interpersonal interaction. And without live interpersonal interaction, social psychology loses much of itself. This sets up an intriguing dilemma for further multi-lab replications. Supposedly the shift toward getting large amounts of data from people sitting at computers will improve the validity of our findings, so they will replicate better. Yet the findings thus far suggest, on the contrary, that live social interaction produces more replicable results. References Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D.M., & Bushman, B.J. (in press). A review of multi-site replication projects in social psychology: Is it viable to sustain any confidence in social psychology’s knowledge base? Perspectives on Psychological Science. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 396-403. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00051. x Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378. *Ito, H. , Barzykowski, K., Grzesik, M., Gülgöz, S., Gürdere, C., Janssen, S. M. J., Khor, J., Rowthorn, H., Wade, K. A., Luna, K., Albuquerque, P. B., Kumar, D. , Singh, A. D., Cecconello, W. W., Cadavid, S. , Laird, N. C., Baldassari, M. J., Lindsay, D. S., & Mori, K. (2019). Eyewitness memory distortion following co-witness discussion: A replication of Garry, French, Kinzett, and Mori (2008) in ten countries. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(1), 68–77. doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2018.09. 004 More .