Month: August 2020

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 out against some common patterns in social science research. Why, despite the long history of research and intuitive appeal of the contact hypothesis, have no studies like this been done before? How did this paper benefit from integrating rigorous quantitative methods with a careful understanding of history and context? How did a commitment to not just the letter, but also the spirit, of preregistration keep the conclusions aligned so well with the data? Plus: We answer a letter about whether the COVID pandemic means this is an especially bad time to start a Ph.D. program.

Links:

• Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq, by Salma Mousa
• Can playing together help us live together? Commentary by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Chelsey Clark
• Twitter thread by Betsy Paluck

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 83. It was recorded on August 19/20 (US/AUS), 2020.

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 fear-laden memory, it becomes possible to change the emotional association – something with clear relevance to clinical practice. Along the way, the replicating scientists encountered anomalies which led them to try to reproduce the analyses in the original study – and they discovered that they could not. We talk about what this means for science. What are the implications of knowing that for a nontrivial number if scientific studies, the math doesn’t add up? Will a new era of open data and open code be enough to fix the problem? How much will Verification Reports – a new publication format that Cortex has introduced – help with that process? Plus: We answer a letter about swinging for the fences when your dream job comes up but you don’t feel ready yet.

Links:

• The three R’s of scientific integrity: Replicability, reproducibility, and robustness, by Robert McIntosh and Chris Chambers
• The Validity of the Tool “statcheck” in Discovering Statistical Reporting Inconsistencies, by Michèle Nuijten et al
• Analytic reproducibility in articles receiving open data badges at Psychological Science: An observational study, by Tom Hardwicke et al

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

 

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

 

This is episode 82. It was recorded on August 10, 2020.