This story describes an 1) an efficacy study that 2) touches on some I/O/Health psychology research and 3) has gained the unwanted attention of government regulatory agencies charged with protecting research participants.   The study described in this story is an efficacy study that questions a decision made by the 2003 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Specifically, this decision capped the number of hours that first-year medical student can work at 80/week and a maximum shift of 16 hours. The PIs want to test whether or not these limits improve resident performance and patient safety. They are doing so by assigning medical students to either 16-hour maximum shifts or 30-hour maximum shifts. However, the research participants didn't have the option to opt out of this research. Hence, an investigation by the federal government. So, this is interesting and relevant to the teaching of statistics, research methods, I/O, and health psychology for a numbe...

The original idea for using this article this way comes from Dr. Susan Nolan 's presentation at NITOP 2015, entitled " Thinking Like a Scientist: Critical Thinking in Introductory Psychology."  I think that Dr. Nolan's idea is worth sharing, and I'll reflect a bit on how I've used this resource in the classroom. (For more good ideas from Dr. Nolan, check out her books, Psychology , Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences , and The Horse that Won't Go Away (about critical thinking)). Last summer, the National Academy of Sciences Proceedings published an article entitled "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks ." The gist: Facebook manipulated participants' Newsfeeds to increase the number of positive or negative status updates that each participant viewed. The researchers subsequently measured the number of positive and negative words that the participants used in their own status updates. They fou...

This story describes a 1966 journal article that argues that signing an informed consent isn't the same as truly giving informed consent. I think this is a good example for the ethics section of a research methods class as it demonstrates some deeply unethical situations in which participants weren't able to give informed consent (prisoners, non-English speakers, etc.). Indeed, the context within which the informed consent is provided is very important. It also provides a historical context regarding the creation of Institutional Review Boards. The original 1966 article is here .