The Official Blog of the Journal of European Psychology Students
Psychological researchers try to understand how the mind works. That is, they describe observable phenomena, try to induce explanatory theories, and use those theories to deduce predictions. The explanatory value of a theory is then assessed by comparing theoretical predictions to new observations. Continue reading
With the rise of social media, potential distractions have risen to unseen levels; they dominate our daily lives. Do you check Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, or Email on a constant basis? Do you have an embarrassing relationship with your alarm clock’s snooze button? Do you pass on social invites, telling other people that you are too busy? As a generation, we have lost the ability to focus sharply on the task at hand; instead, we work on a multitude of things simultaneously, lamenting that we do not achieve what we seek to achieve. Continue reading
Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.
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There is no panacea for bad science, but if there were, it would certainly resemble Registered Reports. Registered Reports are a novel publishing format in which authors submit only the introduction, methods, and planned analyses without actually having collected the data. Thus, peer-review only focuses on the soundness of the research proposal and is not contingent on the “significance” of the results (Chambers, 2013). In one strike, this simple idea combats publication bias, researchers’ degrees of freedom, makes apparent the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory research, and calms the researcher’s mind. There are a number of journals offering Registered Reports, and this is arguable the most important step journals can take to push psychological science forward (see also King et al., 2016). For a detailed treatment of Registered Reports, see here, here, here, and Chambers (2015). Continue reading
Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.
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For too long, Psychology has had to put up with costly, bulky, and inflexible statistics software. Today, we’d like to introduce you to a breath of fresh air: jamovi, free statistics software available for all platforms that is intuitive and user-friendly, and developed with so much pace that its capabilities will potentially soon outrun SPSS. Continue reading
A hackathon is an event, typically lasting for 24-48 hours, in which a group of people with diverse backgrounds come together to solve a problem by building a first working prototype of a solution (usually a web app, program or a utility).
There is something inherently likable, or dare I say, smart, about hackathons. They have a specific goal, your progress and results are measurable, getting a first working prototype is both achievable and realistic, and it will all be over in 24-48 hours. I have come to appreciate hackathons a lot over the last five months where I’ve participated in five, and won two of them with my teams. I would like to invite you to participate in one as well by giving you 7±2 tips to make your hackathon experience especially enjoyable. Continue reading
Data scientist and developer at Qlouder. While at the University of Tartu and University of Toronto, I was inspired to learn more about efficient learning and mnemonics. Midway through the studies I discovered my passion for research methodology and technical side of research, statistics and programming, also machine learning. I’m volunteering as a Lead Archivist for the Nordic Psychology Students’ Conference (NPSC). I'm former President of the Estonian Psychology Students’ Association and former Junior Editor at the Journal of European Psychology Students’ (JEPS). I sometimes tweet @tkivisik .
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With a reliable internet connection comes access to the enormous World Wide Web. Being so large, we rely on tools like Google to search and filter all this information. Additional filters can be found in sites like Wikipedia, offering a library style access to curated knowledge, but it too is enormous. In more recent years, open online courses has rapidly become a highly popular method of gaining easy access to curated, high quality, as well as pre-packaged knowledge. A particularly popular variety is the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which are found on platforms like Coursera and edX. The promise – global and free access to high quality education – has often been applauded. Some have heralded the age of the MOOC as the death of campus based teaching. Others are more critical, often citing the high drop-out rates as a sign of failure, or argue that MOOCs do not or cannot foster ‘real’ learning (e.g., Zemsky, 2014; Pope, 2014). Continue reading
Skeptical scientist. I study how people learn from educational videos in open online courses, and how we can help them learn better. PhD student at Leiden University (the Netherlands), but currently a visiting scholar at MIT and UMass Lowell. You can follow me on Twitter: @Research_Tim and read my blog at www.timvanderzee.com
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R is a statistical programming language whose popularity is quickly overtaking SPSS and other “traditional” point-and-click software packages (Muenchen, 2015). But why would anyone use a programming language, instead of point-and-click applications, for data analysis? An important reason is that data analysis rarely consists of simply running a statistical test. Instead, many small steps, such as cleaning and visualizing data, are usually repeated many times, and computers are much faster at doing repetitive tasks than humans are. Using a point-and-click interface for these “data cleaning” operations is laborious and unnecessarily slow: Continue reading
Last summer saw the publication of the most important work in psychology in decades: the Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration, 2015; see here and here for context). It stirred up the community, resulting in many constructive discussions but also in verbally violent disagreement. What unites all parties, however, is the call for more transparency and openness in research.
Eric-Jan “EJ” Wagenmakers has argued for pre-registration of research (Wagenmakers et al., 2012; see also here) and direct replications (e.g., Boekel et al., 2015; Wagenmakers et al., 2015), for a clearer demarcation of exploratory and confirmatory research (de Groot, 1954/2013), and for a change in the way we analyze our data (Wagenmakers et al., 2011; Wagenmakers et al., in press). Continue reading
Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.
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Registered Reports (RRs) are a new publishing format pioneered by the journal Cortex (Chambers 2013). This publication format emphasises the process of rigorous research, rather than the results, in an attempt to avoid questionable research practices such as p-hacking and HARK-ing, which ultimately reduce the reproducibility of research and contribute to publication bias in cognitive science (Chambers et al. 2014). A recent JEPS post by Dablander (2016) and JEPS’ own editorial for adopting RRs (King et al. 2016) have given a detailed explanation of the RR process. However, you may have thought that publishing a RR is reserved for only senior scientists, and is not a viable option for a postgraduate student. In fact, 5 out of 6 of the first RRs published by Cortex have had post-graduate students as authors, and publishing by RR offers postgraduates and early career researchers many unique benefits. Continue reading
When you think of a smoker, it is likely that you are imagining someone who goes through a pack of cigarettes per day and can often be found running to the nearest store to maintain their supply. Perhaps you amuse yourself watching your friend conspicuously leaving work to stand outside and huddle around their cigarette in the rain. Your assumption would often be correct as the majority of smokers are dependent on nicotine and smoke throughout the day. These daily smokers account for approximately 89% of current smokers in the UK (Herbec, Brown and West 2014), and between 67%-75% of smokers in the USA (Coggins, Murrelle and Carchman 2009). However, what about this missing proportion of smokers? Continue reading