We know that using a cell phone while driving is dangerous, and that the risk of crashing is even greater among teenage drivers (Gershon et al., 2019). I’ve heard people say, “Let them crash. They’ll learn.” While punishment delivered as an environmental consequence can be effective, we’re not talking about a child not watching where they are walking and bumping into a pole. We’re talking about people piloting 2,000-pound missiles filled with flammable liquids traveling over 60 mph. Not only might a crash caused by inattention kill the driver, but it might kill their passengers, pedestrians, and the occupants of other vehicles. In addition to the cost in lives, there are the medical costs of the people who survive and the financial payouts related to the vehicles. The more people that crash vehicles, the greater the cost of medical and car insurance for everyone. In sum, we are all better off when people do not crash. After covering operant conditioning, invite your students to work in small groups (in person or in a class discussion forum) to answer this question: What can we do to encourage drivers to use their cell phones less while driving? If you’d like to add in some experimental design practice, ask students how they could test their ideas. They should include the levels of the independent variable with operational definitions and the dependent variable with operational definition. Invite volunteers from each group to share their ideas and their experimental designs. Lastly, share with students this freely available journal article that describes how one research team addressed this issue (Delgado et al., 2024). Ask students to answer the following questions: The researchers didn’t have a hypothesis because they didn’t have a prediction of the results. Instead, they had a question and an objective. What were these? When was the study conducted? How many volunteers participated in the study? How long were data collected from each volunteer? There were six levels of the independent variable which the researchers called “trial arms.” Identify all six, and describe how each was operationally defined. What was the primary dependent variable which the researchers call “measure”? How many seconds per hour on average were the control group volunteers on their phones while driving? The researchers report that their statistical analyses showed that the only interventions that had an effect compared to the control group were “standard incentive plus feedback,” “reframed incentive plus feedback,” and “double reframed incentive plus feedback.” How many seconds per hour less compared to the control group on average were the volunteers in these three groups on their phones while driving? What was the average cost per person for the most successful intervention? In the “discussion” section of the article, the researchers note that the heaviest phone users while driving showed no impact from the interventions. What do you think the heaviest phone-use-while-driving drivers are doing on their phones while driving? Identify an incentive that you think would help such drivers reduce phone use while driving. I recently had a conversation with a person who said that she knows that being on her phone while driving is dangerous. When she finds herself picking up her phone when she is driving, she immediately tosses it into the backseat.   References Delgado, M. K., Ebert, J. P., Xiong, R. A., Winston, F. K., McDonald, C. C., Rosin, R. M., Volpp, K. G., Barnett, I. J., Small, D. S., Wiebe, D. J., Abdel-Rahman, D., Hemmons, J. E., Finegold, R., Kotrc, B., Radford, E., Fisher, W. J., Gaba, K. L., Everett, W. C., & Halpern, S. D. (2024). Feedback and financial incentives for reducing cell phone use while driving: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 7(7), e2420218. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.20218 Gershon, P., Sita, K. R., Zhu, C., Ehsani, J. P., Klauer, S. G., Dingus, T. A., & Simons-Morton, B. G. (2019). Distracted driving, visual inattention, and crash risk among teenage drivers. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 56(4), 494–500. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2018.11.024   ... View more

Will visitors to vending machines make healthier purchases if they know which purchases are healthier? After discussing experimental design, ask your students to work in small groups. First, they are to take the above question and reword it as a hypothesis. As part of their design, they should identify the independent variable and its levels and identify the dependent variable—providing operational definitions of the levels of the independent variable and the dependent variable. After discussion has waned, ask a volunteer from each group to share their group’s design. Conclude this activity by sharing the design and results from this freely available experiment conducted in Philadelphia (Gibson et al., 2024). Researchers tested four different messaging systems in 267 vending machines; 150 machines sold beverages and 117 sold snacks. The study began with a 9-month period where researchers just monitored sales at these machines. The intervention period began immediately after this baseline period and lasted 13 months. All of the materials used in this study are available with the article. Click on “supplemental content,” and select “Supplement 2.”    Message 1: Beverage-tax poster only. Next to the beverage machines, the poster read, “Philly bev tax is here. Starting January 1, 2017, a 1.5-cents-per-ounce tax will be applied to sweetened beverages.” Next to the snack machines, the poster read, “Are you drinking fewer sweetened drinks because of the cost? Keep up the healthy choices by also choosing healthy snacks.” For the remaining three conditions, a poster placed next to the vending machine explained how to interpret the labels. Message 2: Green labels. These labels were placed on items that were deemed a healthier choice. For example, seltzer water and popcorn got green labels. In the corresponding poster’s small print were the criteria the researcher’s used for the green label. This was their operational definition of “healthy.” Healthy beverages had 5g or less of sugar per 12 ounces. Healthy snacks Message 3: Traffic lights. Green, yellow, or red labels were placed on each vending machine option. Again, green labels were on healthier items like seltzer water and popcorn; the poster explained these were “choose often” options. Yellow labels were on so-so items like diet drinks and trail mix; the poster explained these were “choose sometimes” options. Lastly, red labels were on unhealthy items like sweetened teas and chocolate bars; the poster explained that these were “choose rarely” options. In the poster’s small print were the criteria used for determining what was green, yellow, and red. Message 4: Physical activity. Each item had a label noting how many minutes of brisk walking it would take to work off the calories in the beverage or snack. The accompanying poster noted that the healthier items would take less than 45 minutes to walk off. The primary dependent variable was product sales; data were provided by the vending machine company. Researchers compared sales data from the green label, traffic light, and physical activity conditions vending machines with the beverage-tax poster only vending machines. Here are some of the key results. “Traffic light machines were 25% more likely to sell a yellow (eg, taxed diet soda) compared with a red (eg, taxed soda) beverage compared with beverage tax machines.” While purchasers didn’t go green, some were willing to go from red to yellow. If you go to the machine to get a Coke, you might be willing to go Coke Zero, but declining the Coke for a seltzer water is asking a bit much.   “For snacks, green-only machines were 10% more likely to sell a green snack (eg, baked chips) compared with a red snack (eg, candy) compared with beverage tax machines.” If you want Doritos, you might be talked into popcorn. “At the machine level, physical activity compared with beverage tax decreased the expected monthly number of beverages sold by 24%.” If you go to the machine to get a Pepsi, and you see that it’s going to take 62 minutes of brisk walking to walk off the calories, you might choose to fill up your water bottle instead. “Traffic light labels significantly decreased total calories sold per customer trip compared with physical activity.” The researchers did a manipulation check. They asked the visitors to the vending machines if they noticed “any posters or labels displayed on the machines.” In the beverage-tax poster group, 26% reported seeing the poster. In the green-only group, 40% reported seeing the green labels. In the traffic light group, 65% noticed the green, yellow, red labels. In the physical activity group, 58% noticed the brisk-walking-minutes labels. Interestingly, “Reported noticing of messaging did not moderate condition effects on calories sold per trip.” Are any of your students interested in replicating this study at your institution? What would they need to do in order to conduct this experiment? Would they make any changes to the original study? Why or why not?     Reference Gibson, L. A., Stephens-Shields, A. J., Hua, S. V., Orr, J. A., Lawman, H. G., Bleich, S. N., Volpp, K. G., Bleakley, A., Thorndike, A. N., & Roberto, C. A. (2024). Comparison of sales from vending machines with 4 different food and beverage messages: A randomized trial. JAMA Network Open, 7(5), e249438. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.9438   ... View more

As telehealth visits skyrocketed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers wondered if the physician’s background mattered to their patients (Houchens et al., 2024). (The article is freely available.) The researchers asked volunteers to look at seven photos of the same physician with different backgrounds: bedroom, kitchen, bookcase, exam room, physician office (counter with office-type things on it), a wall of diplomas, and a solid color (control condition).  The researchers also asked about the type of physician (primary care or specialty care) and whether the patient’s length of relationship with the physician (new or established). This experiment is a 7 (type of background) x 2 (type of physician) x 2 (length of relationship) within-participants design, although they analyzed it as a 7 x 4 (lumping type of physician and length of relationship into one variable). In the results, neither type of physician nor length of relationship mattered. The only statistical difference was for type of background. There were two dependent variables. First, researchers asked volunteers which of the seven backgrounds they preferred. As compared to the solid color background, volunteers preferred the wall of diplomas followed by the physician office. The least preferred—again as compared to the solid color background—were the bedroom and the kitchen. There were no statistical differences between the solid color and the bookcase or the exam room. For the second dependent variable, researchers calculated a composite score after asking volunteers to rate the physicians with each background on six factors on a scale of one to ten: “how knowledgeable, trustworthy, caring, approachable, and professional the physician appeared, and how comfortable the physician made the respondent feel.” As compared to the solid background (7.7), the only two backgrounds where the physician was rated statistically lower were the bedroom (7.2) and the kitchen (7.0). Because this was a within-participant design and volunteers saw the same physician against every background, I could imagine that once volunteers rated one, it may have been more difficult to rate the others much differently.   After sharing this study with your students, give small groups this hypothesis: If students see an instructor in a virtual classroom with a professional background, they will rate the instructor as being more knowledgeable and trustworthy. Ask students to design an experiment to test this hypothesis. Students should be sure to identify the independent variable and its levels and the two dependent variables, providing operational definitions for all variables. Invite a spokesperson for each group to share their experimental design.   Reference Houchens, N., Saint, S., Kuhn, L., Ratz, D., Engle, J. M., & Meddings, J. (2024). Patient preferences for telemedicine video backgrounds. JAMA Network Open, 7(5), e2411512. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.11512   ... View more

“In the U.S., 42% of people are now myopic [nearsighted] – up from 25% back in the 1970s. In some East Asian countries, as many as 90% of people are myopic by the time they're young adults” (Godoy, 2024). That’s a lot of people who need corrective lenses. But the news is worse than that. “Once a kid gets myopia, their eyeball will keep stretching and the condition will get progressively worse. If they develop high myopia, it can increase the risk of serious eye problems down the road, such as retinal detachments, glaucoma and cataracts. It can even lead to blindness” (Godoy, 2024). That, I did not know. I also did not know “that light stimulates the eye to release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which can slow the eyeball from stretching” (Godoy, 2024). Researchers thought this would make for a good correlational study. In a study of 4,000 children, researchers found that the more time the children spent outside, the lower levels of myopia they had, even after “adjusting for near work, parental myopia, and ethnicity” (Rose et al., 2008). Here's an opportunity to give your students some experimental design practice in the sensation and perception chapter. After sharing the above information with students, give small groups this hypothesis: If children spend at least two hours a day outdoors, they will develop less myopia (nearsightedness). Ask students to address the following: Design an experiment that will test the hypothesis. Identify your independent variable, including the experimental group and the control group. Identify your dependent variable. All variables should include operational definitions. Your experiment should include random assignment to conditions. Briefly explain the importance of random assignment. Review the five general principles from the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association. By these standards, would it be ethical to conduct your study? Why or why not? Invite a spokesperson from each group to share their group’s research design and their assessment of the ethics of conducting that study. To conclude this activity, share this information with your students. A Taiwanese ophthalmologist, Pei-Chang Wu, whose son was entering first grade convinced his son’s school to allow the children to spend more time outside. At the same time, he convinced another school to allow him to test their school children for myopia. “A year later, his son's school had half as many new myopia cases as the other school” (Godoy, 2024).  After these preliminary results, Wu did similar studies at other schools and found similar results. Pause here to ask your students to assess whether Wu’s research meets American Psychological Association’s ethical guidelines. Why or why not. Wu obviously has some pretty mean persuasive skills, but check out what he did next. With the data in hand, he convinced Taiwan’s Minister of Education to make a policy change that required schools to get children outside for two hours a day. “The program launched in September 2010. And after decades of trending upward, the rate of myopia among Taiwan's elementary school students began falling – from an all-time high of 50% in 2011 down to 45.1% by 2015” (Godoy, 2024). If time allows, ask students what schools and parents can do to help ensure children are getting two hours outside each day per the recommendation of ophthalmologists. Are your students ready to start a letter-writing campaign to their local school boards?   References Godoy, M. (2024, May 13). Want to protect your kids’ eyes from myopia? Get them to play outside. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/13/1250555639/kids-eyesight-myopia-near-sighted-nearsightedness-outdoor-play Rose, K. A., Morgan, I. G., Ip, J., Kifley, A., Huynh, S., Smith, W., & Mitchell, P. (2008). Outdoor activity reduces the prevalence of myopia in children. Ophthalmology, 115(8), 1279–1285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2007.12.019   ... View more

With the NCAA women’s and men’s basketball tournaments behind us, the NBA playoffs coming up, and the WNBA season starting soon, here’s a timely research paper on free throw shooting (Büttner et al., 2024). While most basketball play involves interactions between players, the free throw is unique. Everything comes to a standstill while a player—with all eyes on them—attempts to make a basket from 15 feet away.  While waiting to make the free throw, players have time to think. That’s not a good thing in a sport that relies on a brain that automatically runs programs for particular sets of muscle movements. Of all the activities in basketball—because of the time to think—the free throw may be the most susceptible to stress-induced errors. If stress can impact free throw accuracy, Christiane Büttner (University of Basel), Christoph Kenntemich (Universität Koblenz-Landau), and Kipling D. Williams (Purdue University) wondered if social support could reduce the stress thereby increasing accuracy (Büttner et al., 2024). Read  their paper on ResearchGate. The researchers had three hypotheses, but for the purpose of this activity, let’s focus on this one: “Only after missing the first free throw (but not when the first free throw was successful), does being touched by more (vs. fewer) teammates increase the likelihood of success with the second free throw” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 2). If basketball is not your sport, this video will help you understand what the post-free-throw touching looks like. During the third quarter of the Iowa-UConn women’s NCAA 2024 final, UConn’s Aaliyah Edwards was fouled. She went to the line for two free throws. (Watch video.) After missing the first one, One of the two teammates in front of her (#25) tap her hands. Edwards turned around, and the two teammates behind her tap her hands. When Edwards turned back toward the free throw line, the teammate who missed the tap (#10) was standing there waiting to do her tap. That’s all four teammates. Edwards stepped to the line for her second shot. (Spoiler alert!) She made it. Was Edwards’ experience typical? Do hand taps following a missed free throw predict a made free throw on the next shot? To do this study, the researchers took an archival approach. Using the recordings of 50 Division I Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) women’s basketball games, they measured several variables with the key measures being the outcome of the first and second free throws (they only looked at free throws that came in pairs) and the number of hand taps after the first free throw. They observed 699 pairs of free-throws. They found that if a player missed the first free throw, the more teammates who tapped their hand, the greater the chance that the player would make their second free throw. If a player made the first free throw, the number of hand taps did not predict the making of the second free throw. Ask your students to determine if this was a correlational study or an experiment. How do they know?  The researchers wrote: “[W]e do acknowledge that our findings are correlational and the caveats that come with that” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). Teams were not, for example, randomly assigned to tap the hand of the free-throw shooting player zero to four times. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop the researchers from making a causal statement in the next paragraph: “Physical touch by teammates boosts performance in one of the most stressful athletic tasks imaginable: Succeeding with a free throw in basketball after already missing one” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). They do, however, encourage experimental research: “Future experimental research should determine whether physical touch improves performance as an active ingredient or whether more frequent touch is a symptom of better team cohesion and, consequentially, better performance under pressure” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). After sharing this study with students, there are a couple of different directions you could take this. Choose your own adventure. Option 1: Experiment. Ask students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would test this hypothesis: “Only after missing the first free throw (but not when the first free throw was successful), …being touched by more (vs. fewer) teammates increase[s] the likelihood of success with the second free throw”(Büttner et al., 2024, p. 2). Participants would need to be randomly assigned to conditions. Students should identify the independent variable (including its levels) and the dependent variable. Ethics add-on: If this experiment were done with real teams—assuming it could be done without the participants being influenced by knowing the hypothesis, discuss the ethical implications of a study that may cause a team to score fewer points. Option 2: Correlation. Ask students to work in small groups to design a correlational study that would test this hypothesis: “[M]ore frequent touch is a symptom of better team cohesion” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). First, create a measure of team cohesion. (Some research has been published in the context of work teams. One alternative is to ask students to do some research and adapt something that has already been created.) Next, describe how you could use that measure to test the hypothesis.     Reference Büttner, C. M., Kenntemich, C., & Williams, K. D. (2024). The power of human touch: Physical contact improves performance in basketball free throws. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 72, 102610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2024.102610       ... View more

Walking in nature is good for us, but what if we’re looking at our phones while we’re walking in nature? Is that walk still beneficial? Researchers Randi Collin and Elizabeth Broadbent at the University of Auckland recognized that this was an empirical question (Collin & Broadbent, 2023). If you’d like to give your students some experimental design practice when you cover stress and coping, ask your students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would test one of Collin and Broadbent’s hypotheses: “phone walking would cause stooped posture, slower walking, lower arousal, and worse mood and affect than walking without a phone.” Students should identify their dependent variables and the experimental and control conditions of their independent variable, including operational definitions. Because this is an experiment, remind students that in their proposed study, participants will need to be randomly assigned to conditions. Invite each group to share their designs. As a take-home assignment, ask students to read Collin and Broadbent’s freely available research paper and answer these questions: The researchers had two hypotheses. One we discussed in class: “phone walking would cause stooped posture, slower walking, lower arousal, and worse mood and affect than walking without a phone.” What was their second hypothesis? What was the study’s independent variable? Identify the experimental and control conditions. What operational definitions for each did the researchers use? When identifying participants for their study, researchers had two requirements that participants had to meet. What were they? When identifying participants for their study, researchers had two things that would exclude a volunteer from their study. What were they? From the “measures” section of the article, identify all of the dependent variables the researchers measured. What operational definitions for each did the researchers use? For each dependent variable, describe whether the researchers found any statistically significant differences between the two conditions. (The article refers to significant differences, but it is understood that they mean statistically significant differences.) Near the end of the discussion section, the researchers identify several limitations in this study. Each limitation is effectively a hypothesis and an invitation to other researchers to test these hypotheses. Choose one of their identified limitations, create a hypothesis based on that limitation, and then design an experiment to test that hypothesis. Identify your dependent variables and the experimental and control conditions of your independent variable. Be sure to include operational definitions.     Reference Collin, R., & Broadbent, E. (2023). Walking with a mobile phone: A randomised controlled trial of effects on mood. Psych, 5(3), 715–723. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych5030046     ... View more

My favorite conference activity is attending poster sessions. I love talking with students. They are always enthusiastic about their research. The poster topic doesn’t matter to me, although I tend to favor the topics I know very little or nothing about. The student presenters get to experience what it’s like to be the experts and in a position to teach someone else not only about their study but about the topic more generally. Last week, I attended the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA) conference. Whenever I had free time, I popped into the posters and wandered around until I found a poster where the presenters were not currently speaking with anyone. “Hi! Tell me about your poster,” I say. The first poster I went to, the students surprised me, though. One student looked at my name badge, and said, “Oh! Sue Frantz. We read a couple of your papers.” I haven’t published much in journals and what I have published was not related to their poster topic, so this was especially surprising. Of course, I asked what they had read. It took them a bit to remember, but they got there. One was a paper on how Intro Psych can dispel myths (McCarthy & Frantz, 2016), and the other was the Intro Psych pillars article (Gurung et al., 2016). Once we had that sorted, I asked why they read those articles. They said that their professor asked them to read one to three articles written by each of the invited speakers in preparation for coming to SEPA. Brilliant! I quickly looked at their poster to find their affiliation: Covenant College. I asked for the name of their professor: Carole Yue. Later that afternoon, I gave my talk on the need to give careful consideration to what we cover in Intro Psych. After the talk, two students came up to me. They said that they needed to interview one of the invited speakers and would I be willing to take 10 to 15 minutes to answer their questions? My first thought was, “I have no idea what questions you are going to ask, but there is no way I can answer them in 15 minutes.” And that was okay by me since I had nowhere in particular I needed to be. But what I said was, “Are you from Covenant College?” Yes, yes, they were. After our conversation—which took at least 30 minutes—I asked that if they see me and their professor, Dr. Yue, in the same room, to please introduce me. I remember my very first conference: Eastern Psychological Association (EPA), Buffalo, NY, 1989. Or at least I’m pretty sure about the location, but the year could have been 1988. That was a long time ago. Anyway, I remember seeing someone whose work I had been reading for a research project I was working on. I wanted to say hi, but I didn’t have any words for after “Hi.” Yue’s students have something to say after “Hi.” The next day, Carole Yue found me, and I learned more about what she does to ensure her students get the most out of their conference experience. I was so impressed, I asked her to email me with what she does because I wanted to share it with all of you. At Covenant College, students can enroll in Psy310: Psych Field Trip. This course was created decades ago by Yue’s predecessor, Mike Rulon. Yue reports that Rulon graciously shared everything with her when she took over the course, and she has since revised it. Here’s the catalog description. The psychology department arranges and sponsors field trips to various professional psychology conventions. The conventions attended in the past have included the Southeastern Psychology Association (SEPA), the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR). By these means, students are able to gain a wide sampling of the range of topics, issues, controversies and personalities in psychology today. A travel fee is individually set for each field trip (based on distance, housing, etc.).   This year’s trip fee was $600, “but presenters get a 50% scholarship. We've been fortunate that the administration has been willing to largely subsidize the trip for students (over half the total cost)” (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024). For context, Covenant College is near Chattanooga, an 8.5-drive to Orlando where this year’s SEPA conference was held.   Students needed to prepare for SEPA by doing the assigned readings (one to three articles by each invited speaker) and discussing some of those articles with one to three other SEPA attendees. Yue ensures students get exposure to what’s new in a breadth of topics. She divides psychology into eight broad areas (e.g., clinical/counseling/addiction/therapies, neuroscience/cognitive neuroscience/neurology, industrial-organizational/human factors/forensic). Students need to identify one session in at least five of those eight categories that they plan on attending. Yue writes, While at the conference, students check in with me around 8am and receive their per diem for food…They conference all day, and we meet for dinner each night…We then have debriefing meetings after dinner where each student shares about their day. Even though it makes the days very long, students also generally appreciate having the debriefing because they get to reconnect and hear about talks they didn't get to, unusual experiences, or interview/presentation tips. At some point during those two days, students need to find and interview (or have a substantial conversation with) a psychologist. I give them some interview guidelines and suggested questions/topics, but I do encourage them to think of it as a professional fact-finding mission and tailor questions to their own interests (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024). After the conference, students write about their experiences. Yue writes, Their post-SEPA writings are reflections/summaries of their experiences…I've divided it up into one for each day (Thursday and Friday), as well as a summary of their concentration…They do a summary of their interview, and they do a final reflection of the trip in the style of a letter to a future student who might be considering attending SEPA… Students also submit a list of "Five 5's" in which they tell me 5 things they thought were unusual or surprising (behavioral or content-based), 5 applications they want to implement, 5 memorable events, 5 ideas/concepts they want to remember, and 5 suggestions to me.  Since we have the evening debriefs and the long bus ride home, we won't meet again this week. I think one of the appealing aspects of the course is that after the trip is done, they're done with the class (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024).  Based on the interactions I had with four of Yue’s students, there is no doubt in mind that they were well-prepared for attending SEPA. After Yue shared with me how she prepared them, I understood why. Conferences can be overwhelming, especially for first-time attendees. Yue’s students are familiar with the conference program and the invited speakers, and they have goals they want to accomplish. What an amazing experience it must be for them—and for their professor. Yue adds, “[T]his course is only possible because the students really jump into the work, and they're amazing. It's such a privilege to see them stretch themselves and grow into themselves as psychologists” (C. Yue, personal communication, March 19, 2024) If you are interested in exploring similar assignments or a similar course for your students, please download Yue’s Psy310 syllabus, pre-SEPA requirements checklist, concentration plan, and breadth requirements.   References Gurung, R. A. R., Hackathorn, J., Enns, C., Frantz, S., Cacioppo, J. T., Loop, T., & Freeman, J. E. (2016). Strengthening Introductory Psychology: A new model for teaching the introductory course. American Psychologist, 71(2), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040012 McCarthy, M. A., & Frantz, S. (2016). Challenging the status quo: Evidence that Introductory Psychology can dispel myths. Teaching of Psychology, 43(3), 211–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628316649470 Yue, C. (2024, March 18). Re: SEPA student assignment [Personal communication]. Yue, C. (2024, March 19). Re: SEPA student assignment [Personal communication].   ... View more

If I were a manager or business owner needing to hire someone, the number one characteristic I would want in a new employee is conscientiousness. That Big Five trait predicts job performance in, well, just about every job (Wilmot & Ones, 2021). I was reminded of this after reading a recent Ars Technica article about spreadsheet errors (Thorne, 2024). More accurately, the article is about humor errors in spreadsheets that led to, well, bad things. While the article cited several examples, the one that made me choke on my coffee happened at Crypto.com in 2021 (Taylor, 2023). Thevamanogari Manivel moved from Malaysia to Australia in 2015 to escape “controlling relationship with her husband.” By 2018, she had saved up enough money to bring her oldest of three children to Australia. In 2020, she met Jatinder Singh who became her boyfriend. He was interested in cryptocurrency. He signed up for a Crypto.com account, but used Manivel’s bank account information to transfer $100 (AUD) into his Crypto.com account. Crypto.com said—and rightfully so—because the name on the bank account does not match the name on the Crypto.com account, we can’t accept this payment. So far so good. A Crypto.com employee was tasked with issuing the refund. Before I continue, please put down your coffee or other beverage. You should also swallow that bite of biscotti. Ready? In the Excel spreadsheet, instead of entering “100” in the refund box, the employee entered Manivel’s bank account number. Now, let’s all take a minute to look at our bank account number. Starting from the right and working left, count in two numbers and enter a period. Count in three numbers, and enter a comma. Repeat. Read that number out loud.  Manivel woke up one day to find approximately $10,470,000.00 AUD in her account. This discovery triggered a number of events. When Manivel asked her Singh some version of WTH, he said he won the money in a Crypto.com contest. Singh then said let’s move this money out of this account into an account with a different bank. (Perhaps the other bank had a better interest rate?) And then they begin spending it. Well, sure. Seven months later, during a routine audit, Crypto.com discovers the error. This probably says more about how much money is flowing through Crypto.com than anything else. Over 10 million dollars goes missing, and no one notices. For. Seven. Months. So, what does Crypto.com do? They contact Manivel’s bank asking for the money back. The money’s not in that account anymore. (No, I don’t know why Manivel’s bank didn’t ask questions earlier, like when the $10 million suddenly appeared in an account that likely had no more than maybe a few thousand in it at any given time.) Manivel said she thought scammers were trying to get their mitts on the dough. (Not her wording. But maybe she enjoys a good 1940s noir detective novel like I do. Or maybe not. The sexism can make for a challenging read.) Long story short, Manivel and Singh were arrested and the money was recovered. Manivel was sentenced to 200 hours of community service for her “opportunistic crime” plus time served (209 days). She had been held in custody awaiting trial because she was deemed a flight risk. Given that she was arrested at the Melbourne airport carrying $10,000 cash and a one-way ticket to Malaysia, that wasn’t a difficult call (Beatty, 2023a). Singh, the now-former boyfriend, pled guilty to the theft charge and as of early February, 2024 is awaiting sentencing (Beatty, 2023b). There is no word, however, on what happened to the Crypto.com employee who made the $10 million error. I bet they are no longer employed by Crypto.com. Maybe they are a highly conscientiousness employee who made this error while temporarily distracted. Mistakes happen. And there should certainly be processes in place to catch errors of this magnitude. I cannot even quit MS Word without being prompted to ask if I’d like to save my file before closing it. Having a little pop-up that says, “You’re about to refund $10 million dollars. Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” wouldn’t be hard to program. It also seems that for refunds of any size, a second person should have to approve it. Unless Crypto.com is continually shuffling millions of dollars around accounts. And they may very well be. In any case, all of this* could have been avoided if an employee with a high degree of conscientiousness had—after entering the account number in the refund amount box—reviewed their work before submitting it. Only if they had reviewed their work before submitting it—just as we ask our students to do. There is some evidence that we can up our conscientiousness game. In one study, Nathan Hudson (2021) gave participants a list of 50 challenges and asked the participants to choose up to four challenges for the week, such as “organize and clean up your desk” and “show up 5 min early for a class, appointment, or other activity” (p. 5). (For the complete list of challenges, see the appendix in Hudson et al., 2019). At the end of 16 weeks, those who completed more challenges had a greater increase in conscientiousness. Could such an intervention work with our students? Create a list of, say, 20 course-based challenges that target conscientiousness, such as “show up 5 min early for a class,” “submit a class assignment 24 hours early,” “complete the assigned reading before class,” “attend every class session this week,” “do not look at your phone during any class session this week.” If you’d like to involve your students in creating the list, give them Nathan Hudson’s list of 50, and invite students to work in small groups to choose items off his list (verbatim or revised) and create one or more of their own. Each week, ask students to choose two challenges and report those to you. At the end of the week, ask students to report if they successfully completed one or both of their challenges. Repeat each week. As a dependent measure, you could do a pre-test/post-test conscientiousness score from the Big Five Inventory. Or if you want to go for behavioral impact, choose an assignment from early in the course—before you implemented the challenges—and record when each student submitted the assignment as it relates to the assignment deadline. For example, if an assignment was due at 5pm, assignments that were submitted an hour would get a +60 (minute) score. Assignments that were submitted a half hour late would get a -30 (minute) score. For the week that your last assignment is due, do not run any challenges and calculate the “deadline score” for each of our students. Next, calculate a “deadline progress score” by subtracting the first assignment’s deadline score from the last assignment’s deadline score. A student who submitted their last assignment two hours early (+120) but submitted their first assignment 10 minutes early (+10), would have a difference score of +110, meaning they picked up 110 minutes worth of conscientiousness from the start of the challenges to the end. Similarly, a student who submitted their first assignment 15 minutes late (-15) and submitted their last assignment 15 minutes early (+15) picked up 30 min worth of conscientiousness. If you decide to do this research in your class, follow your institution’s IRB guidelines and report your findings in the Teaching of Psychology, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, or at conference, such as the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s Annual Conference on Teaching.     References Beatty, L. (2023a, September 8). Thevamanogari Manivel: $10m landed in mum’s bank after Crypto.com bungle. News.Com.Au. https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/courts-law/thevamanogari-manivel-10m-landed-in-mums-bank-after-cryptocom-bungle/news-story/e5900a5b0a2d89f0f2c6d2b2bad0a19d Beatty, L. (2023b, December 18). Jatinder Singh: Crypto enthusiast ‘knew’ $10m windfall was a mistake, court told. News.Com.Au. https://www.news.com.au/finance/jatinder-singh-crypto-enthusiast-knew-10m-windfall-was-a-mistake-court-told/news-story/8cc90e827e75a9119259d4ea3a7d79d3 Hudson, N. W. (2021). Does successfully changing personality traits via intervention require that participants be autonomously motivated to change? Journal of Research in Personality, 95, 104160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104160 Hudson, N. W., Briley, D. A., Chopik, W. J., & Derringer, J. (2019). You have to follow through: Attaining behavioral change goals predicts volitional personality change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(4), 839–857. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000221 Taylor, J. (2023, September 24). A crypto firm sent a disability worker $10m by mistake. Months later she was arrested at an Australian airport. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/24/a-crypto-firm-sent-a-disability-worker-10m-by-mistake-months-later-she-was-arrested-at-an-australian-airport Thorne, S. (2024, January 28). We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/we-keep-making-the-same-mistakes-with-spreadsheets-despite-bad-consequences/ Wilmot, M. P., & Ones, D. S. (2021). Occupational characteristics moderate personality–performance relations in major occupational groups. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 131, 103655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2021.103655   *”All of this” includes—but is not limited to—the hours spent by employees at Crypto.com and Manivel’s bank trying to recover the money, the hours spent by the police tracking down Manivel and Singh, the resources spent to keep them in jail while awaiting their time before the judge, the hours spent by the employees of the court system.   ... 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The Freakonomics Radio podcast aired an episode on scientific fraud. While the title of the episode leans toward hyperbole, the discussion is a bit more nuanced. We don’t actually know how much fraud there is, but we know that researchers have many reasons to be tempted to cheat—just like students have many reasons to be tempted to cheat. Here are some discussion or assignment questions based on the podcast. Shout out to Ellen Carpenter for the prompting. *** Listen to or read the transcript of this Freakonomics Radio podcast, Episode 527: Why is there so much fraud in academia? (Dubner, 2024). The podcast host, Stephen J. Dubner, says: “I rarely do this, but today I’m going to start by reading a couple sentences from Freakonomics, which Steve Levitt and I published in 2005: ‘Cheating,’ we wrote, “may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor … Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.’” Perhaps you have cheated at least once in school, at work, or in a relationship. You certainly know people who have. Describe one of those cheating incidents in terms of “getting more for less.” Explain cheating behavior in terms of positive reinforcement. Brian Nosek, founder of the Center for Open Science, explains why academic fraud is so problematic. One reason he gives is the impact fraudulent research can have on public policy. The reach is greater than that, however. Describe how fraudulent research can affect public views on a topic and how it can affect other researchers in their decisions on what to research. Nosek says, “Publication is the currency of advancement. I need publications to have a career, to advance my career, to get promoted…The reality here is that there is a reward system, and I have to have a career in order to do that research. And so, yes, we can talk all about those ideals of transparency and sharing and rigor, reproducibility. But if they’re not part of the reward system, you’re asking me to either behave by my ideals and not have a career or have a career and sacrifice some of those ideals.” Is the motivation any different from the one that students have to cheat? Explain. While the podcast host tries to pin Nosek down into saying that there is more fraudulent research in psychology—social psychology in particular—than other sciences. Nosek points out that this perception of greater academic fraud in social psychology may be due to two factors. What are they? The issue of academic fraud is certainly not limited to psychology. For example, the journal Science has been addressing this issue. Recent editorials include how “errors, intentional or not erode confidence in science” and how researchers should be able to correct unintentional errors in their published work without stigma (Thorp, 2023, p. 743), the use of an AI tool to detect duplications of or manipulations in images submitted for publication so that questions can be addressed before publication (Thorp, 2024), and the challenges involved in identifying scientific misconduct (Oransky & Redman, 2024).   5. Briefly describe the research that was published in the sign-at-the-top paper. What data had Max Brazerman concerned? How were his concerns about that data alleviated? How did Data Colada know to look at the sign-at-the-top paper? What in the paper concerned Data Colada? 6. What reasons does Simine Vazire give for why a researcher may falsify or misrepresent research data? 7. At state universities, legislatures have substantially cut funding (Marcus, 2019). Colleagues—especially those at R1 and R2 universities—report that they are under a lot of pressure to bring in grant money. To compete for the limited amount of grant dollars available, researchers must have an active research program that produces results. Would there be as much temptation to cheat if everyone could do their research without pressure to publish? Similarly, would students feel less temptation to cheat if their work was lower stakes? 8. The American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct clearly addresses falsification of data in 8.10 “Reporting Research Results” (American Psychological Association, 2017). APA can only hold members of APA accountable for their code of ethics. Frankly, the worst that APA can do is expel members who have been found in violation of the code (American Psychological Association, 2016). Universities have their own ethics committees and wield more power in the sense that faculty found in violation of the ethics code could, ultimately, be fired. What could professional associations or universities do to ensure ethical research practices before fraudulent research is published?     References American Psychological Association. (2016). 2016 APA Ethics Committee rules and procedures. https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/committee-2016 American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. https://www.apa.org/ethics/code Dubner, S. J. (2024, January 10). Why is there so much fraud in academia? Freakonomics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-there-so-much-fraud-in-academia/ Marcus, J. (2019, February 26). Most Americans don’t realize state funding for higher ed fell by billions. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions Oransky, I., & Redman, B. (2024). Rooting out scientific misconduct. Science, 383(6679), 131–131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn9352 Thorp, H. H. (2023). Correction is courageous. Science, 382(6672), 743–743. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adm8205 Thorp, H. H. (2024). Genuine images in 2024. Science, 383(6678), 7–7. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn7530       ... View more

I had a colleague who was a reading teacher. She told me the greatest teaching challenge she had was in finding articles for her students to read that her students found relevant and compelling. I feel the same way about teaching research methods, including the research methods chapter in Intro Psych. There are a lot of studies that will illustrate psychology’s different research methods, but finding studies that students will find relevant and compelling can be a challenge. If we pick the right studies, however, we can get a two-fer: students learn about research methods and they learn about the study’s content. In the In Brief section of the November/December 2023 Monitor on Psychology was a blurb on an observational study that might grab the attention of students—particularly our students from working class backgrounds. In this freely available article, researchers wondered if pre-school students from different socio-economic backgrounds would show different degrees of participation during all-class discussions (Goudeau et al., 2023). In the article’s introduction, the authors cite two reasons as to why students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds might participate less. The first is a cultural mismatch between a low SES student’s homelife and school, a mismatch that does not exist for middle- and high- SES students. For example, working class parents are less likely to encourage their children to publicly express opinions. Cultural psychologist Alana Conner grew up in a working-class family in Memphis. When she went to Yale for college, her grandmother gave her a poster with this adage, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”* Conner experienced culture shock her first semester as the (middle- and high-SES) students in her classes seemed to have no issues with sharing their thoughts and opinions. When I heard Conner speak about this at a conference, I had an “Aha!” moment. I, too, grew up in a working-class family, and I said very little in my classes—kindergarten through grad school. In my family, we didn’t talk about ideas. Another possible contributor to this cultural mismatch is the activities families from different SES backgrounds tend to engage in. Middle- and high- SES families are more likely to read books and go to museums than low-SES families. “As a result, these students have more ‘cultural capital’ to contribute during whole-class discussions relative to low-SES peers with similar language proficiency. Teachers may also perceive middle- and high-SES students as having more ‘relevant’ or ‘appropriate’ things to contribute to discussions, so they may provide these students with more opportunities to speak relative to low-SES students with similar language proficiency” (Goudeau et al., 2023, p. 3). In addition to cultural mismatch, stereotype threat may also contribute to decreased class discussion participation from low-SES students. The low-SES stereotype says that low-SES students are not as academically competent as middle- and high-SES students. Out of fear of confirming the stereotype, low-SES students may choose to remain silent (Goudeau et al., 2023). Unfortunately, this silence may actually contribute to the stereotype. Researchers wondered if a difference in class participation by SES status could be observed as early as preschool. If time allows, ask your students how we could approach designing a study like this. Where would we find our participants? Whose permission would we need to observe classes? How would we observe them? How many times would we observe them? How would we operationalize participation? The researchers identified preschool classes that had the highest SES diversity as determined by parental occupation. They asked the teachers for permission to video record their classes. For the teachers that said yes, the researchers then asked the caregivers of the teachers for permission for their child to participate. Three to five days of recording were done for the classes for four preschool teachers. Four video cameras were used to record each class. The students were told that their class was being recorded. The researchers wrote, “We coded each preschooler’s contributions to whole-class discussions along two dimensions: frequency and duration… [and] we coded for five different types of contributions: (a) speaking after being called on by the teacher; (b) speaking after being called on again for follow-up; (c) speaking without being called on by the teacher; (d) speaking by interrupting another child; and (e) speaking by interrupting the teacher” (Goudeau et al., 2023, p. 6). Two coders watched the recording and coded the behaviors. Coders discussed all disagreements to reach consensus. The researchers found that low-SES students were much less likely to speak during all-class discussions, and when they did, they spoke for less time than did their middle- and high-SES peers. Low-SES students were also much less likely to interrupt the teacher or their peers, and if they did, they spoke for less time as compared to the middle- and high-SES students (Goudeau et al., 2023). Lastly, does participation matter? In a follow-up study, researchers found that the preschoolers believe that students who participate more in class discussions are more intelligent, better liked, and nicer (Goudeau et al., 2023).   If time allows or as a follow-up assignment, ask your students to design a study that assessed class participation by SES and peer perceptions of those who participated more that could be conducted in a college class. How might participation be operationally defined in a face-to-face class, in an asynchronous online class, or in a class conducted in Zoom or Microsoft Teams? As a bonus research project, assess whether discussing this research in your class increases whole-class discussion participation from your low-SES students. Learning about such research may have encouraged me to up my class participation. In college, I remember hearing about a study that found that when driving a vehicle men tended to look farther into the distance than did women. That ticked me off, so when driving, I started looking farther into the distance. I, of course, had no idea how my distance-viewing compared to other women or men. I might have already been looking farther ahead than anybody else. Didn’t matter. I was going to show them. Not that anyone was actually evaluating how far into the distance I looked when driving. Does learning about this study result in real changes for your low-SES students? It’s an empirical question.     *It is unknown who first spoke these exact words, but the sentiment can be found in Proverbs 17:28 (O’Toole, 2010).   References Goudeau, S., Sanrey, C., Autin, F., Stephens, N. M., Markus, H. R., Croizet, J.-C., & Cimpian, A. (2023). Unequal opportunities from the start: Socioeconomic disparities in classroom participation in preschool. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(11), 3135–3152. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001437 O’Toole, G. (2010, May 17). Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Quote Investigator. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/17/remain-silent/   ... View more

After covering experiments, ask your students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would test this hypothesis: If patients are able to schedule their own mammograms, they are more likely to actually get a mammogram. For their design, ask students to identity the independent variable (experimental and control conditions) and dependent variable. They should be sure to include operational definitions. Once discussion seems to have died down, invite a volunteer from each group to share their design. In this freely available article, researchers conducted such a study using archival data (Waddell et al., 2023). Consider sharing this study with your students. Because the study was archival, it was quasi-experimental—participants were not randomly assigned to conditions. In this particular healthcare system, patients were not able to self-refer for a mammogram; a physician had to order it, say, during an office visit. The healthcare system implemented a new electronic health record portal that gave patients the ability to schedule their mammograms without having to call the clinic. Some patients were not active in the portal so they were considered the control group. Patients who were active in the portal (operationally defined as having logged into the system at least once in the twelve months prior to the visit with their physician who ordered the mammogram)—and therefore could electronically schedule their appointments—were in the experimental group. The dependent variable was an easy one to measure. Did the patient get a mammogram within six months of the doctor’s appointment when the mammogram order was issued? Approximately 73% of the experimental group got a mammogram within six months as compared to approximately 54% of the control group. There was one big confounding variable, however. Those who were active in the portal (experimental group) received a reminder email after their doctor’s visit to schedule a mammogram. Those who did not use the portal (control group) did not receive a reminder. There is no way for us to know, then, if the differences seen in the dependent variable were due to being able to electronically schedule a mammogram or due to receiving an email reminding them to schedule. If you share this study with your students, ask students to consider what other confounding variables there may be. The researchers identify a few others in the “Limitations” section of the article’s discussion. For example, might there be a difference between those who logged into the electronic health record portal and those who hadn't? Would the experiments your students designed address these confounds? Conclude this activity by reminding students that while each type of research method has its limitations, the more types of methods we use to address a hypothesis, the more confidence we have in the overall results. As an out-of-class assignment, consider asking your students to generate other hypothesis about patients and healthcare behavior. How would they design an experiment or quasi-experiment using archival data to test one of those hypotheses?   Reference Waddell, K. J., Goel, K., Park, S.-H., Linn, K. A., Navathe, A. S., Liao, J. M., McDonald, C., Reitz, C., Moore, J., Hyland, S., & Mehta, S. J. (2023). Association of electronic self-scheduling and screening mammogram completion. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, S0749379723004440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2023.11.002         ... View more

The New York Times has noted new data showing a rise in pedestrian deaths (Leonhardt, 2023). The article offers several possibilities for this increase. One reason may be that drivers are paying more attention to their phones than to the road and what’s going on around them. I’ll add built-in car displays in that category. With a physical knob or dial, adjusting music/audiobook volume or in-cabin temperature could easily be done by touch. With screens, drivers have to look away from the road to make these adjustments. The article also suggests that the greater availability of marijuana and opioids has more people driving under the influence of something. Additionally, more people are living in areas where sidewalks and crosswalks are less common. When people walk on the road, it stands to reason that their chances of being hit by a driver increase. Lastly, the article notes that with more people living on the streets, there are more opportunities for people and cars to collide. I’d add one more possibility. It seems like cars are quieter than they used to be—electric vehicles certainly are. If pedestrians rely on sight and sound to help with vehicle awareness, quiet cars reduce those sensory modalities by half. The New York Times article makes excellent points. What is missing from this discussion, however, is pedestrian behavior. In my informal observations of pedestrians—both as a driver and as a fellow pedestrian, some pedestrians seem pretty cavalier about occupying the same space as cars. Here are a few examples I’ve experienced in the last two weeks. There is a fairly busy rural road near my home that has a few rolling hills. There is no sidewalk. It’s possible to walk on the side of the road, but with the rocks, it looks like it would be tough trekking. I’ve seen one person on two different occasions walking on the road, walking with traffic, and wearing over-the-ear headphones. It’s not difficult for me to imagine a car cresting one of those hills and not seeing this person in time to avoid them—especially if there is oncoming traffic. The person would have no chance since they can neither see nor hear oncoming traffic. Just yesterday I was leaving our local post office when a person crossed the street in front of me. They did not look either direction before crossing. They were wearing a big hood that functioned just like blinders. If I had been any closer, they would have walked into the side of my car. Actually, a couple weeks ago, I was the passenger in a car when a person who had not looked for oncoming cars, stepped off the curb and came very close to walking into the side of our car. The car was a red Camaro. It was not easy to miss. Not paying attention to surroundings is as much of a problem for pedestrians as it is for drivers. While a pedestrian who steps into a crosswalk when the lighted guy turns green is in the right and the inattentive driver who hits them is in the wrong, being right does not make the pedestrian any less dead. Have pedestrians become less attentive? I don’t know. If we are, I can imagine several reasons why. Just like drivers, phones have pedestrians’ attention. I also wonder if today’s pedestrians have less experience being pedestrians than pedestrians of the past. For example, stranger danger pushed kids indoors, giving them less experience on streets. Furthermore, more of my students today do not know how to drive as compared to my students in the past. Does less experience behind the wheel make it harder for pedestrians to see the world through a driver’s eyes? This could be the basis of an interesting observational study for your students. Can your students devise measurements that would quantify pedestrian or driver attentiveness? For example, does a randomly selected pedestrian look both ways before stepping into the street? Or does a randomly selected driver stopped in an intersection, look both directions before proceeding into the crosswalk? How would your students select the intersections to conduct their observations? Does your city have data on the busiest intersections? Does your local police department have data on where the car/pedestrian crashes occur? What days or times of day would your students choose? As a way to expand student engagement with psychology or as alternative activity, consider asking students to use the persuasive strategies they learned about in their Intro Psych social chapter to design a public ad campaign While the primary goal of the observational study activity is to give students practice designing and conducting an observational study and the primary goal of the public ad campaign is to give students practice putting their knowledge of social psychology to work, the secondary goal for both activities is to increase student traffic safety awareness—both as drivers and as pedestrians.   Reference Leonhardt, D. (2023, December 11). The rise in U.S. traffic deaths. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/briefing/us-traffic-deaths.html   ... View more

The New York Times published a freely-available 5-minute opinion piece on credit cards that offer rewards. They argue that the money rewards cards give back has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from the transaction fees the credit card companies—most notably Visa and Mastercard—charge business owners. They believe that using rewards cards ultimately hurts those in the lower economic strata who are less likely to use rewards cards and so don’t reap their benefits while still paying the higher prices the businesses have to charge to cover the transaction fees. The economists and public policy experts at the International Center for Law and Economics have a different opinion. I am not an economist, but I understand enough to know that this is all more complicated than it may first appear. I am also not so naïve as to believe that if we all stopped using cash-back credit cards, Visa and Mastercard would reduce these transaction fees. As a consumer, however, I have been encountering the reinforcement and punishment of credit card use. I have a credit card that gives me 5% back on gas purchases. Our local gas stations will give me 10 cents off per gallon if I pay with cash. With gas at $3.00 a gallon, when I use this credit card, I get 15 cents off per gallon. I am reinforced with money for using the credit card. The price of gas would need to drop to $2.00 per gallon for the 10 cents for cash equals the 5% back on my credit card. Now let’s imagine a fantasy world where gas is less than $2.00 per gallon. Even if it would cost me less to pay cash, the hassle of walking into the gas station, standing in line, and waiting for the cashier to make change would make using the credit card at the pump or using the app on my phone a more desirable option. And that’s not even calculating the cost of the snacks I’m more likely to purchase if I walk in. In short, the use of this particular credit card at gas stations is reinforced. I also have a credit card that give me 3% back on restaurant purchases. Because of the credit card transaction fees, our favorite local restaurant started adding a 3.5% credit card use fee to all credit card transactions. On a $30 bill (including tip), that’s $1.5, but we would only get 90 cents back from our credit card. Sixty cents isn’t much, but it doesn’t require any extra effort on our part to pay cash—it takes just as long to wait to for server to return with change as it does to wait for them to return with a credit card receipt to sign—so we pay cash and save the 60 cents, thank you very much. In other words, at this restaurant, our credit card use is punished with an extra cost, so we don’t use it. I wonder, though, if customers at this restaurant would be even more likely to pay cash if what we were charged initially included the 3.5% credit card use fee and they framed it as a 3.5% discount for using cash. It’s an empirical question! If you’d like to give your students some experimental design practice, ask them how they would go about testing that hypothesis. Last example. We have a rewards card that gives us 1.5% back on all purchases. We had to have the thermostat replaced on our car. Our mechanic recently started passing the 3.5% cost of the credit card transaction fee onto their clients. On a bill of a few hundred dollars, I would be punished in the form of having to pay many dollars for using my credit card. This was an easy decision. I kept the credit card in my wallet and paid by check. And, no, I don’t remember the last time I wrote a check. As more businesses adopt this strategy, I look forward to the development of the handheld printer that will print checks. It’ll connect via Bluetooth to an app on my phone. I enter the business name and amount, and it prints out the check for me to sign. Ask students if they have a cashback rewards card and if they decide when to use it based on whether businesses explicitly pass the transaction fees solely onto credit card users. My examples may be specific to me—what I find reinforcing and punishing. I can see where some people choose to use the credit card regardless—either because they’ve decided that the convenience of using a card (or app) always outweighs the dollar cost or because they don’t have the cash available so need to put the purchase on credit. ... View more

In a May 2023 Scientific American article, I was introduced to the concept of recreational fear (Martinez-Conde & Macknik, 2023). Of course, we’re all familiar with it. It was the term that was news to me. People who are into recreational fear do things that are scary—for fun: roller coasters, bungee jumping, haunted houses, horror movies. You get the idea. I’ve been on a bobsled (twice) and have been zip lining over some pretty impressive gorges (twice), but horror movies and haunted houses are not my bag. Researchers wondered if being with friends would lessen the intensity of the fear in these recreational settings (Tashjian et al., 2022). Sometimes when we are with others in fear-inducing situations, social buffering occurs. The presence of others reduces our fear. But sometimes we experience social contagion. The presence of others increases our fear. In instances of recreational fear, which is it? Here’s a little experimental design practice for the social psych chapter in Intro Psych. Ask students to work in small groups to design an exploratory study. Since we don’t know (or at least your students don’t know yet) whether the presence of others increases or decreases fear—and we can make a good case for either one, we won’t have an hypothesis. The question is “Does the presence of others in a recreational fear situation increase or decrease fear?” Your students will have a few problems to solve in designing this study. First, the independent variable. Will they focus on the effect of the presence of friends, strangers, or both? Will they investigate the impact of group size? Does the presence of five others have more of an impact than, say, one other person? There is also the challenge of the recreational fear situation itself. Even though your students are not actually going to conduct this study, potential IRB ethical concerns should be considered. I doubt that your IRB would approve of you scaring the bejesus out of your participants. Is there someplace in your community or nearby environs where people pay to be scared? Ask your students to design a study where they would solicit volunteers from those paying customers. And now the dependent variable. How would your students operationally define fear? Invite groups to share their designs with the class. To close this activity, tell students about the Tashjian et.al study (Tashjian et al., 2022). The researchers elicited the help of the good folks at The 17th Door, a haunted house experience now located in Buena Vista, CA. The research article includes a summary of what happens in each of the 17 scenes. I read through them. Here is the researchers’ concise summary. “Each of the 17 contiguous rooms involved distinct threats, including the inability to escape an oncoming car, mimicked suffocation, actual electric shocks, and being shot with pellets by a firing squad while blindfolded” (Tashjian et al., 2022, p. 238). In an understatement for the win, they write, “[T]his type of immersive threat manipulation is not replicable in the lab” (Tashjian et al., 2022, p. 238). The “immersive threat manipulation” lasted 30 minutes. I’ve been on a bobsled and been ziplining over deep gorges. As far as recreational fear goes, I’m pretty sure The 17th Door is not for me. The researchers recruited participants after they paid the admission fee and signed the waiver required by The 17th Door. Participants went through in groups of eight to ten. The researchers asked the volunteers how many friends were in their group. Everyone went through with at least one friend. Some groups were comprised entirely of friends. As a measure of fear intensity, each volunteer wore a wrist sensor that measured skin conductance. The groups of participants are led through the experience by an employee of the The 17th Door on a precisely timed schedule. That allowed the recorded sensor activity to be aligned precisely with the events. Now for the results. Social contagion won out over social buffering. The more friends people had with them, the greater the fear they experienced as measured by skin conductance. The authors acknowledge that because changes in skin conductance are due to sympathetic nervous system arousal, the increase in skin conductance could be caused by factors other than fear, such as excitement or nervousness. To close out this activity, tell students that there is a Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark run by Mathias Clasen and Marc Malmdorf Andersen. If the photo on their “people” page is accurate, their research assistants get lab coats that read on the back “Horror Research Team.” I’m a little jealous. These are the Recreational Fear Lab’s research questions for 2020-2023:     What is recreational fear, and what can it be used for?     What characterizes engagement with recreational fear across the lifespan?     What psychological and physiological characteristics are associated with recreational fear?     When does recreational fear turn into real fear? I’m particularly intrigued by the last question. There is a boundary, but how do we identify it—both as researchers and as a terrified person? In The 17th Door, participants can yell “Mercy” to signal that they want to opt of a scene or opt out of the entire event. What factors contribute to a person making that decision? Is that caused by crossing the line between recreational fear and real fear? Which research question do your students find the most interesting and why?   References Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. (2023, May). Friends can make things very scary. Scientific American, 328(5), 80. Tashjian, S. M., Fedrigo, V., Molapour, T., Mobbs, D., & Camerer, C. F. (2022). Physiological responses to a haunted-house threat experience: Distinct tonic and phasic effects. Psychological Science, 33(2), 236–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211032231   ... View more

In the (freely available) editorial that opened the June 2, 2023 edition of Science, H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science, reminds us that “it matters who does science” (Thorp, 2023, p. 873). His point is that scientists are human, humans make mistakes, therefore scientists make mistakes. And we should just own that. Science is riddled with mistakes. Thorp urges us to use the phrase “trust the scientific process,” because it suggests that “science is what we know now, the product of the work of many people over time, and principles that have reached consensus in the scientific community through established processes of peer review and transparent disclosure” (Thorp, 2023, p. 873). Science is the process, not just a collection of known facts—or a collection of theories that tie the known facts together into a (semi-)coherent whole.   Thorp also notes that when a working group of scientists all have the same preconceived notions, their biases may affect the research questions they ask, how they try to the answer those research questions, and how they may interpret the results. However, when people with different lived experiences and cultural backgrounds are part of the research process, “scientific consensus can be reached faster and with greater reliability” (Thorp, 2023, p. 873).  Yes, science is riddled with mistakes, but the greater diversity of experiences we bring to science the faster we can rid ourselves of these mistakes and reduce the number of mistakes we make going forward. I’m reminded of some of my favorite psychologists whose lived experiences led them to ask the research questions they are now famous for. Mamie and Kenneth Clark asked young Black children to choose the doll they would like to play with: a Black doll or a white doll. The children chose the white doll. That research, which was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, influenced the outcome of what we now know as Brown vs. Board of Education. Anyone could have done that research, but only Black psychologists thought to ask the question. Lillian Gilbreth, the mother of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology, became interested in efficient kitchens after 1920s sexism resulted in dropped business contracts after her husband’s death. Again, anyone could have done research into how to create an efficient kitchen, but only a female psychologist thought to ask the question. In a more recent example, researchers have been uncovering the factors that contribute to racial disparities in sleep quality, such as racial disparities in shift work, exposure to light and air pollution, and acculturation stress. Sure, we can tell people to get better sleep, they need to sleep in a quiet, dark, cool room, but what if they live in an urban environment with plenty of middle-of-the-sirens, ambient street lighting, and no air conditioning? And what if they work the night shift? What if what’s keeping them awake is worrying about whether their boss’s racism is keeping them from getting raise or promotion? Researchers who are asking these questions include Girardin Jean-Louis, Dayna Johnson, Carmela Alcántara, and Alberto Ramos (Pérez Ortega, 2021). After covering research methods in Intro Psych, ask your students to read Thorp’s editorial. Next, invite your students to consider their own lived experiences. What research questions would they ask?   References Pérez Ortega, R. (2021). Divided we sleep. Science, 374(6567), 552–555. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.acx9445 Thorp, H. H. (2023). It matters who does science. Science, 380(6648), 873. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi9021   ... View more