Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that guides statistical choices. When that happens, I email my buddy and fellow W.W. Norton author, Beth Morling, and we write a joint blog post. Recently, I emailed her because research on using psychedelics to treat many different mental disorders has been in the news.  President Trump fast-tracked this research,  and the  Journal for the American Medical Association recently published a big meta-analysis  on the topic. Psychedelic research has always interested me because of psychology, but it has always amused me because of how you run a proper double-blind research study if your experimental participants KNOW that they are hallucinating and your control group participants know they are not?  This broader question offers a few great discussion options for you and ...

How much do our personalities change when we're drunk? Not as much as we think. We know this due to the self-sacrificing research participants who went to a lab, filled out some scales, got drunk with their friends. For science! Here is the research, as summarized by the first author .  Here  is the original study. This example admittedly panders to undergraduates. But I also think it is an example that will stick in their heads. It provides good examples of: 1) Self-report vs. other-report personality data in research. -Two weeks prior to the drinking portion, participants completed a Big Five personality scale as if they were drunk. So, there is the self-report of Drunk!Participant. And during the drinking session, participants had their Big Five judged by research assistants coding their interactions with friends, allowing a more object judgment of the Drunk!Participant. The findings: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/personality-may-change-whe...