Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label evolutionary psychology

Using manly beards to explain repeated measure/within subject design, interactions.

There are a lot of lessons in this one study  (Craig, Nelson, & Dixson, 2019): Within subject design, factorial ANOVA and interactions,and data is available via OSF. Let's begin: TL: DR: The original study looked and the presence or absence of beards and whether or not this affected participants' ability to decode the emotional expression on a man's face. Or, more eloquently: TL: DR: Their stimuli were pictures of the same dudes with and without beards. And those weren't just any dudes, they had been trained in the Ekman facial coding system as to make distinct expressions. Or... One participant, rating the same man in Bearded vs. Non-bearded condition, provides a clear example of within subject research design. This article also provides examples of interactions and two-way ANOVA. Here look at aggression ratings for expressing (happy v. angry) and face hairiness (clean-shaven v. beard). Look at that bearded face interaction! Bearded guy...

Science Friday's "Spot the real hypothesis"

Annie Minoff delves into the sins of ad hoc hypotheses using several examples from evolutionary science (including evolutionary psychology) . I think this is a fun way to introduce this issue in science and explain WHY a hypothesis is important for good research. This article provides three ways of conveying that ad hoc hypotheses are bad science. 1) This video of a speaker lecturing about absurd logic behind ad hoc testing (here, evolutionary explanations for the mid-life "spare tire" that many men struggle with). NOTE: This video is from an annual event at MIT, BAHFest (Bad Ad Hoc Fest) if you want more bad ad hoc hypotheses to share with students. 2) A quiz in which you need to guess which of the ad hoc explanations for an evolutionary finding is the real explanation. 3) A more serious reading to accompany this video is Kerr's HARKing: Hypothesizing after results are known (1998), a comprehensive take down of this practice.

Shameless self-promotion 2

Here is a link to a recent co-authored publication that used Second Life to teach students about virtual data collection as well as the broader trend in psychology to study how virtual environments influence interpersonal interactions. Specifically, students replicated evolutionary psychology findings using Second Life avatars. We also discuss best practices for using Second Life in the class room as well as our partial replication of previously established evolutionary psychology findings (Clark & Hatfield, 1989, Buss, Larson, Weston, & Semmelroth, 1992).