Waitress Bella is on TikTok . She shares her beach looks and hauls, like plenty of other influencers. Recently, though, shared a series of TikToks that have a home in our statistics and research methods classes.  Bella had a hypothesis. She suspected that certain hairstyles influenced her customers to tip her more. So Bella tested her hypothesis over a series of within-subject, n = 1 experiments at work ( Bella, 2022a , Bella, 2022b , Bella, 2022c ) This isn't a pre-registered paper with open data, but I think this could be a good discussion piece in a research methods or statistics class. I swear that Kate isn't my burner account. If you really, really wanted to test this hypothesis properly, what would that research look like? 1) What external factors influence tips (day of the week, time of day, etc.)? 2) What factors influence reactions to waitstaff (gender, attractiveness, alcohol)? 3) Would you use a within or between research design to study this (different waitstaff wit...

Michael Hobbes shared a Tweet from Nick Gillespie. That Tweet was about an essay from The Bulwark . That Tweet plays fast and loose with Likert-type scale interpretation. The way Hobbes and his Twitter followers break down the issues with this headline provides a lesson on how to examine suspicious research clickbait that doesn't pass the sniff test. First off, who says "close to one in four"? And why are they evoking the attempt on Salman Rushdie's life, which did not happen on a college campus and is unrelated to high-profile campus protests of controversial speakers?  Hobbes dug into the survey cited in the Bulwark piece. The author of the Bulwark piece interpreted the data by collapsing across response options on a Likert-type response scale. Which can be done responsibly, I think. "Very satisfied" and "satisfied" are both happy customers, right? But this is suspicious. Other Twitter users questioned the question and how it may leave room for i...

 I teach with JASP.  Compared to, say, SPSS, JASP doesn't drain my computer of its processing abilities. But it takes more than a Chromebook to run. And I know that many of my Psych Stats colleagues are teaching with SPSS, which takes way more than a Chromebook to run.  This is troublesome because some of our students have Chromebooks. Or second-hand laptops or very inexpensive laptops that fit their budget and run Word just fine but leave some of our students at a disadvantage regarding their ability to succeed in classes that require more than Word. I bet many of these students are financially responsible for themselves and operating on a limited budget. So let's help those students. I learned about a workaround for this problem from one of the ITS employees at Gannon University. A workaround that may be obvious to some of you but I never knew about. It helped one of my students who had a crap top AND (at the time) a concussion, and she was struggling to keep up with wo...

Life is so hard and I like to share stuff to make teaching statistics a bit easier. Here are my syllabi for stats this fall ( Honors Psyc Stats , Psyc Stats ). They have been inspired by some of the amazing, re-imagined syllabi I've seen shared on Twiiter and Facebook. While I share these with my students in .PDF form, these versions are in .PPTX form in case you want to steal them.

Ok, so this from Reddit: This, of course, inspired me to cook up an example for Psych Stats, in the catty spirit of this very judgmental regression about the life and love of Dennis Quaid . Here is a Google Sheet that contains ALL of the data featured above, as well as a sheet that contains JUST the GF's age when they first started dating. Maybe this example is a little better for our younger students who haven't heard of Dennis Quaid. Anyway, enjoy.

Alright, kismet, coincidence, I don't know. Still, I'm noticing all of these recent and good scientific articles contain the types of statistical analyses we typically teach in Psych Stats. Like this article: Hatano, A., Ogulmus, C., Shigemasu, H., & Murayama, K. (2022). Thinking about thinking: People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.  Advance online publication.  https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001255 TL;DR: People think they won't enjoy being alone with their thoughts. BUT THEY DO, as the authors demonstrated throughout five experiments. And those experiments contained a bunch of t -tests ( and open data ). There are even a couple of ANOVAs in there.  This is a fine example of how to flesh out a hypothesis using a multi-study design. And it is a round-about way of making our students (and ourselves) reflect on how we feel about boredom, alone time, and technology. It also contains some very effe...

 You have to walk before you can run, right? The basics we teach in Psych Stats help our students walk, but they are not typical of published psychology research. It is difficult for Psych Stat instructors to find good examples of our analyses in recently published research (for an exception, check out Open Stats Lab ). A recent publication caught my eye because I love sending people mail ( scroll down to find my list of recommended, envelope-friendly surprises ).  Liu, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., & Min, K. E. (2022). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , No Pagination Specified-No Pagination Specified. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000402 Spoiler alert: People love being surprised by mail. Like, more than the sender thinks the receiver will be surprised. I was delighted to discover that this interesting paper consists of multiple studies that use what we teach in Psych Stats. Check out this article s...