Recently Science published a paper concluding that people do not like sitting quietly by themselves (.html). The article received press coverage, that press coverage received blog coverage, which received twitter coverage, which received meaningful head-nodding coverage around my department. The bulk of that coverage (e.g., 1, 2, and 3) focused on the tenth study in…
Category: Discuss Paper by Others
[11] “Exactly”: The Most Famous Framing Effect Is Robust To Precise Wording
In an intriguing new paper, David Mandel suggests that the most famous demonstration of framing effects – Tversky & Kahneman's (1981) “Asian Disease Problem” – is caused by a linguistic artifact. His paper suggests that eliminating this artifact eliminates, or at least strongly reduces, the framing effect. Does it? This is the perfect sort of paper…
[3] A New Way To Increase Charitable Donations: Does It Replicate?
A new paper finds that people will donate more money to help 20 people if you first ask them how much they would donate to help 1 person. This Unit Asking Effect (Hsee, Zhang, Lu, & Xu, 2013, Psychological Science) emerges because donors are naturally insensitive to the number of individuals needing help. For example,…
[1] "Just Posting It" works, leads to new retraction in Psychology
The fortuitous discovery of new fake data. For a project I worked on this past May, I needed data for variables as different from each other as possible. From the data-posting journal Judgment and Decision Making I downloaded data for ten, including one from a now retracted paper involving the estimation of coin sizes. I created…