We should teach with data sets representing ALL of our students. Why? You never know what example will stick in a student's head. One way to get information to stick in is by employing the self-reference effect .  For example, students who grew up in the country might relate to examples that evoke rural life. Like getting the first day of buck season off from school and learning how to watch out for deer on the tree line when you are going 55 MPH on a rural highway. Enter State Farm's data on the likelihood, per state, of a car accident claim due to collision with an animal (not specifically deer, but implicitly deer) . Indeed, my home state of Pennsylvania is the #3 most likely place to hit a deer with your car. State Farm shares its data per state: https://www.statefarm.com/simple-insights/auto-and-vehicles/how-likely-are-you-to-have-an-animal-collision I am also happy to share my version of the data , in which I turned all probability fractions (1 out of 522) into probabili...

  The Science of Scare project, conducted by MoneySuperMarket.com, recorded heart rates in participants watching fifty horror movies to determine the scariest of scary movies. Below is a screenshot of the original variables and data for 12 of the 50 movies provided by MoneySuperMarket.com: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ Here is my version of the data in Excel format . It includes the original data plus four additional columns (so you can run more analyses on the data): -Year of Release -Rotten Tomato rating -Does this movie have a sequel (yes or no)? -Is this movie a sequel (yes or no)? Here are some ways you could use this in class: 1. Correlation : Rotten Tomato rating does not correlate with the overall scare score ( r = 0.13, p = 0.36).   2. Within-subject research design : Baseline, average, and maximum heart rates are reported for each film.   3. ...

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.