More of a Comment Than a Question – Details, episodes & analysis

OK, we may have a problem. 

Here, in this, our fourth attempt at a final episode, we welcome our friends from the excellent Nullius In Verba podcast Daniël Lakens and Smriti Mehta (yes THAT Smriti Mehta) to discuss why psychology is worthless. Or whether psychology is worthless. Something like that. 

Anyway, enjoy! This is the last one for sure...

Rachel had a baby! Paul left academia! It is all happening and we have the world exclusive scoop for you dear listeners in this ultra special super secret extra extra final episode of MOACTAQ. 

We were joined by Professor Chris Ferguson of Stetson University to discuss his upcoming new book 'Catastrophe!: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse'  and whether Paul can join his Dungeons and Dragons game. Thankfully we (mostly) avoided discussing *that* Qualitative Research paper.

We welcome University of Miami postdoc Shane Littrell on the pod to discuss his research on bullshitting, Paul's pretentious website, and Thomas Chatterton Williams' bad week online.

Find out more about Shane's research on his website here

In this episode we welcome marketing graduate student and TikTok celebrity Ethan Milne onto the podcast to talk about his social media fame, his research, an interesting incident at his Western University, the concept of 'elite capture,' and more.

Follow Ethan on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SEthanMilne and on TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/@tallpsychology?lang=en

The hijab kiss incident: https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/western-university-lgbtq-poster-sparks-muslim-community-backlash/wcm/c1b69e57-a678-45a4-be94-bab4044b46bf/amp/

We discuss gun violence and mass shootings in the USA, as well as the debate around 'Great Replacement Theory.'

Links:

Cloud Research's Innovations in Online Research Conference: link
Tweet thread from Professor Geoffrey Miller on gun control

We discuss the moral philosophy of abortion, and make a few comments about the public reaction to the leaked Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision.

Here's some data on the stability of public attitudes toward abortion since the 70s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

And here's some data about the relative prevalence of bi-sexuality and homosexuality: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/how-many-people-lgbt/

In this episode we are joined by famous podcaster Yoel Inbar (who we also found out is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto) to discuss a recent controversy surrounding this paper in PNAS, and the ethics of training machine learning models to judge and modify facial images in ways consistent with the stereotypical impressions of humans.

We also briefly discussed the dumb stick-figure meme people have been talking about.

Here are just a few pieces of research on people's ability to judge personality from physical appearance:
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.994.7&rep=rep1&type=pdf
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/000712606X109648
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-20823-006

We were joined by Cory Clark, director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss her research on ideological bias in science, adversarial collaboration, cheerleading, powerpoint, and more.

Follow Cory on twitter here: https://twitter.com/ImHardcory

Check out the Adversarial Collaboration Project here: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/adcollabproject/

We chatted with Aaron Moss, senior researcher at Cloud Research, about his recent paper on the ethics of using MTurk for behavioral research, conflicts of interest, global capitalism, and Will Smith.

Read Aaron's paper here https://psyarxiv.com/jbc9d/

Check out Cloud Research here https://www.cloudresearch.com/