As described in our previous post (.htm), back in 2006 [email protected] sent three Excel spreadsheets, each “last saved” by user “Dan Ariely”, to then-PhD-student-but-now-full-professor Kyle Hyndman. Those spreadsheets contained the data required to reproduce the results reported in Ariely and Wertenbroch’s (2002) influential article on deadlines and procrastination. In our previous post, we reported data…
Category: Discuss Paper by Others
[139] Artificial Deadlines (Part 2):
[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002 (.htm), found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally…
[134] Figuring Out Figure 1
A few years ago our Journal Club discussed an interesting methods paper entitled, “Putting Psychology to the Test: Rethinking Model Evaluation Through Benchmarking and Prediction” (.htm). This post describes my attempt to understand what’s happening in Figure 1 of that paper, which shows that extremely simple experiments can generate extremely negative R2s. I learned a…
[131] Bending Over Backwards:
The Quadratic Puts the U in AI
For a recent journal club in Barcelona, we read a just published article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (JEP:G). The paper is on the impact of using gen-AI on creativity. The paper proposes an inverted U: people are most creative with moderate levels of AI use. The paper has three studies. Studies 1…
[128] LinkedOut: The Best Published Audit Study, And Its Interesting Shortcoming
There is a recent QJE paper reporting a LinkedIn audit study comparing responses to requests by Black vs White young males. I loved the paper. At every turn you come across a clever, effortful, and effective solution to a challenge posed by studying discrimination in a field experiment. But, no paper is perfect, and this…
[127] Meaningless Means #4: Correcting Scientific Misinformation
Before we got distracted by things like being sued, we had been working on a series called Meaningless Means, which exposed the fact that meta-analytic averaging is (really) bad. When a meta-analysis says something like, “The average effect of mindsets on academic performance is d = .32”, you should not take it at face value….
[125] “Complexity” 2: Don’t be mean to the median
In Colada[124] I summarized a co-authored critique (with Banki, Walatka and Wu) of a recent AER paper that proposed risk preferences reflect ‘complexity’ rather than preferences a-la Prospect Theory. Ryan Oprea, the AER author, has written a rejoinder (.pdf). Its first main point (pages 5-12), is that our results with medians are ‘knife edge’ (p.8),…
[124] “Complexity”: 75% of participants missed comprehension questions in AER paper critiquing Prospect Theory
Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) “Prospect Theory” article is the most cited paper in the history of economics, and it won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in 2002. Among other things, it predicts that people are risk seeking for unlikely gains (e.g., they pay more than $1 for a 1% chance of $100) but risk averse for…
[122] Arresting Flexibility: A QJE field experiment on police behavior with about 40 outcome variables
A forthcoming paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), “A Cognitive View of Policing” (htm), reports results from a field experiment showing that teaching police officers to “consider different ways of interpreting situations they encounter” led to “reductions in use of force, [and] discretionary arrests” (abstract). In this post I explain why, having spent…
[121] Dear Political Scientists: Don’t Bin, GAM Instead
There is a 2019 paper, in the journal Political Analysis (htm), with over 1000 Google cites, titled “How Much Should We Trust Estimates from Multiplicative Interaction Models? Simple Tools to Improve Empirical Practice“. The paper is not just widely cited, but is also actually influential. Most political science papers estimating interactions now-a-days, seem to…