Hey!  I'm giving a keynote at the February annual teaching pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. It's all about social psychology stats example. Like this one! This one demonstrates social comparison theory without ever saying social comparison theory. YouGov published data  ( here is the full data source ) that asked participants to rate their own, close-other, and far-others on several factors related to modern life (see below). In doing so, they unknowingly trigger social comparison theory, and in particular, downward social comparison. TL;DR: We know ourselves and how well we are doing compared to other people. And people are motivated to feel good about themselves.     https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/48400-americans-compare-own-outlook-with-country-poll These findings smack of downward social comparison, right? Instead of having a specific target we are comparing ourself to, like a co-worker or a neighbor,...

Don't you love it when research backs up your lifestyle? My kids LOVE dancing. We have been able to get both kids hooked on OK GO and Queen and Metallica. The big kid's favorite song is "Tell Me Something Good" by Chaka Khan and the little kid prefer's "Master of Puppets". We all like to dance together. My kids, husband, and sister dancing. Now, research suggests that our big, loud group activity may increase empathy in our kids. NPR summarized Dr. Laura Cirelli's research looking at 14 m.o.'s and whether they 1) helped or 2) did not help a stranger who either 1) danced in sync with them or 2) danced, but not in sync, with the child. She found (in multiple studies) that kids offer more assistance after they danced in sync with an adult.  How to use in class: 1) Here is fake chi-square, test of independence, data you can use in class. It IS NOT the data from the research but mimics the findings of the research. "Synced?" re...

Jennifer Raff  is a geneticist, professor, and enthusiastic blogger . She  created a helpful guide for how non-scientists (like our students) can best approach and make sense of research articles. The original article is very detailed and explains how to make sense of experts. Personally, I appreciate that this guide is born out of trying to debate non-scientists about research. She wants everyone to benefit from science and make informed decisions based on research. I think that is great. I think this would be an excellent way to introduce your undergraduates to research articles in the classroom. I especially appreciated this summary of her steps (see below). This could be turned into a worksheet with ease. Note: I still think your students should chew on the full article before they are ready to answer these eleven questions. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/09/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-a-guide-for-non-scientists/#author ...

Alright. This teaching idea is pretty involved. It is bigger than any one instructor and requires interdepartmental effort as well as support from The Powers that Be at your university. The U.S. Holocaust Museum hosts a number of  traveling exhibits . One in particular, " Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race ", provides a great opportunity for the discussions of research ethics, the protection and treatment of human research subjects, and how science can be used to justify really horrible things. I am extraordinarily fortunate that Gannon University's Department of History (with assistance from our Honors program as well as College of the Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences) has worked hard to get this exhibit to our institution during the Fall 2015 semester. It is housed in our library through the end of October. How I used it in my class: My Honors Psychological Statistics class visited the exhibit prior to a discussion day about research ethics. In...

Pew Research went around the globe and asked folks in 40 different countries if a variety of different behaviors qualified as "Unacceptable", "Acceptable", or "Not a moral issue". See below for a broad summary of the findings. Summary of international morality data from Pew The data on this website is highly interactive...you can break down the data by specific behavior, by country, and also look at different regions of the world. This data is a good demonstration of why graphs are useful and engaging when presenting data to an audience. Here is a summary of the data from Pew.  It nicely describes global trends (extramarital affairs are largely viewed as unacceptable, and contraception is widely viewed as acceptable). How you could use this in class. 1) Comparison of different countries and beliefs about what is right, and what is wrong. Good for discussions about multiculturalism, social norms, normative behaviors, the influence of religion ...

The Travel Security Agency implemented SPOT training in order to teach air port security employees how to spot problematic and potentially dangerous individuals via behavioral cues. This intervention has cost the U.S. government $1 billion+. It doesn't seem to work. By discussing this with your class, you can discuss the importance of program evaluations as well as validity and reliability. The actual government issued report goes into great detail about how the program evaluation data was collected to demonstrate that SPOT isn't working. The findings (especially the table and figure below) do a nice job of demonstrating the lack of reliability and the lack of validity. This whole story also implicitly demonstrates that the federal government is hiring statisticians with strong research methods backgrounds to conduct program evaluations (= jobs for students). Here is a summary of the report from the Washington Post. Here is a short summary and video about the report from ...

Hofstede is a psychology rockstar who studies multiculturalism (specifically, how his cultural dimensions vary from country to country and how this can impact organizations). This page generates bar graphs that illustrate how the two countries you specify vary on his dimensions. Below is a screen grab of the U.S. compared to Brazil along his dimensions. Note: If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and he discusses Power Distance in the context of the Korean Air safety issues. How could you use this in the classroom? 1) This could be a quick example of the importance of multicultural research (as the Western view of the world/attitudes are not the default setting for humans).  2) A quick way of demonstrating bar graphs. 3) A good example of applied social psychology.  From geert-hofstede.com

I have been using Mueller's CROW website for years. It is a favorite teaching resource among my fellow social psychologists , with TONS of well-categorized resources for teaching social psychology. This resource is also useful to statistics/research methods instructors out there as it contains a section dedicated to research design with a sub-section for statistics.

Darryl Bem on The Colbert Report I love me some Colbert Report. So imagine my delight when he interviewed social psychologist Darryl Bem . Bem is famous for his sex roles inventory as well as his Psi research. Colbert interviewed him about his 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, which demonstrated a better-than-chance ability to predict an outcome. Here, the outcome was guessing which side of a computer screen would contain an erotic image (Yes, Colbert had a field day with this. Yes, please watch the clip in its entirety before sharing it with a classroom of impressionable college students). Big deal? Needless to say, Colbert reveled in poking fun at the "Time Traveling Porn" research. However, the interview is of some educational value because it a)does a good job of describing the research methods used in the study. Additionally, b) h...