Healey's "Study finds a disputed Shakespeare play bears the master's mark"

This story describes how psychologists used content analysis to provide evidence that Shakespeare indeed authored the play Double Falsehood.

The play in question has been the subject of literary dispute for hundreds of years. It was originally published by Lewis Theobold in 1727. Theobold claimed it was based on unpublished works by Shakespeare. And literary scholars have been debating this claim ever since.

Enter two psychology professors, Boyd and Pennebaker. They decided to tackle this debate via statistics. They conducted a content analysis Double Falsehood as well as confirmed work by Shakespeare. What they tested for:

"Under the supervision of University of Texas psychology professors Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker, machines churned through 54 plays -- 33 by Shakespeare, nine by Fletcher and 12 by Theobold -- and tirelessly computed each play's average sentence-length, quantified the complexity and psychological valence of its language, and sussed out the frequent use of unusual words."

Boyd and Pennebaker's work ended up in Psychological Science (as their research used content analysis to seek "psychological signatures" in the text). I think this is an interesting example of a) content analysis, b) statistics and literature coming together, and c) using the rigors of the scientific method to inform a debate and help solve a mystery that exist outside of the realm of science.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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