I have shared  AMPLE examples for teaching correlations . Because I've got you, boo. Like, I have shared days' worth of lecture material with you, my people. I am adding one more example. I have used this example in my positive psychology course for years, and it really illustrates what can happen en masse when marketing departments and less-savory pop-psych elements try to establish causal relationships with features (stereotypes?) of happy countries and individuals' subjective well-being. I like this one because it is math-free, UG-accessible, and not terribly long. Joe Pinsker, writing for the Atlantic, argues that... https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/worlds-happiest-countries-denmark-finland-norway/619299/ TL;DR: Just because Northern European nations consistently score the highest on global happiness data doesn't mean that haphazardly adopting practices from those countries will make you happy. Correlation doesn't equal causation. H ere is the ...

 I enjoy fun ways to refer to the fact that regressions can't be predicted forever. Like, trends have to stop, right? Here is a v. recent one: Thank you, @ronburke! Thank you,  @RomanFolw · https://www.nature.com/articles/431525a/figures/1

I love JAMA Visual Abstracts . I have blogged about them before. They are great ways to illustrate 1) basic, intro stats topics, 2) excellent sci-comm, and 3) psych-adjacent medical examples.  I learned about a recent JAMA publication on NPR (which you could play for your students) . It compared blood pressure in people who were in a Tai Chi exercise condition versus an aerobic exercise condition: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2814872 Here are some ways you could use it in class: 1. Simple factorial ANOVA research design. Two groups with a repeated measure design makes me think "factorial ANOVA."  I have not, but it would be easy to make a 2 x 2 bar graph with this data (the actual data is embargoed until December).  2. Active control group : The control group wasn't sitting on a couch. The control group was doing aerobic activities.  3. Lots of outcomes and potential for significance (and Type II error) : The main thrust of this pap...

This is a very brief example to spice up the measures of central tendency lecture. There is a game show in Germany, and one of the rounds of the game show is performing a perfect median split on food. OF COURSE, IT IS A BAVARIAN HOT PRETZEL. The "splitting championship" game is part of a larger video game. Here is the YouTube version and here is the Reddit version, with more deets on the game show. To be clear, we aren't talking about eye-balling here. The median split is an exact split by weight. Just as a statistical median split is an exact splitting of a data set. Here is a more exact screen grab:  ALSO: Because I love a good internet rabbit hole, the Reddit source I found actually goes into detail about the German game show. Have fun. 

Hey, all- Here is today's (2.8.24) presentation  about working more statistics into your social psychology course. I'm mostly posting this for the folks who went to the conference because I told them I would, but feel free to use this advice to add some novel stats examples to your social psychology classes.

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,...

OK. This wasn't my original idea, but I love it so much that I'm blogging about it. The original idea came from Dr. Andrea Sell, who, in turn, got this idea from one of her brilliant student, Johanna Perez.  How t -distributions are like Brazilian Butt Lifts: A treatise.  First, familiarize yourself with the Brazilian Butt Lift: The fat doesn't leave. As illustrated below, the fat just moves...into the tail.  https://ariamedtour.com/blogs/why-is-bbl-popular/ Is this not what William Gosset did when he created the t -curve? Instead of moving around fat, he moved around probability under the normal curve. He moved that probability into the tails . Both Igo Pitanguy (inventor of the Brazilian Butt Lift) and William Gosset (inventor of the t-test) moved things around as to...CREATE A THICKER (thiccer?) TAIL. THIS IS SUCH A PERFECT METAPHOR. See: