More of a Comment Than a Question

This week, we had to cut our conversation short with a fellow social psychologist-philosopher, Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus of psychology at Swarthmore College, and a visiting professor at Haas School of Business. We discuss Barry's recent paper Science, scholarship, and intellectual virtues.


Schwartz, B. (2020). Science, scholarship, and intellectual virtues: A guide to what higher education should be like. Journal of Moral Education, 1-12.  https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2020.1772211


Some relevant TED talks by Barry:

• Using Your Practical Wisdom: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_using_our_practical_wisdom?language=en
• Our Loss of Wisdom: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_our_loss_of_wisdom/transcript?language=en

Cyanide and Happiness comic about science: https://explosm.net/comics/3557/#lIXOSa8dUTRXlpmY.16

This week, we chat with Don Moore, a professor in the Management of Organization group at the Haas School of Business, and author of Perfectly Confident. We talk about confidence, overconfidence, perseverance, the tall poppy syndrome, and share our favorite dad jokes.


Don's book, Perfectly Confident: https://perfectlyconfident.com/

In our first episode of the new year,  we're joined by Rachel Ernstoff, a social psychology graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill studying intergroup relations and political polarization. In this episode, Rachel shares her fascinating background with us, after which we discuss political polarization and the research around it, the recent attack the Capitol, and Trump's Twitter ban.

Rachel's posts on The Pipettepen: http://www.thepipettepen.com/author/ernstofflive-unc-edu/
Rachel's blog: https://rationalsnowflake.blogspot.com/

ABC News, 24 Hours: Assault on the Capitol (available on Hulu): https://abcnews.go.com/US/attack-capitol-broken-24-hours-hulu-special/story?id=75184339

Twitter's post on the suspension of @realDonaldTrump: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html

This week, we talk to Rob Chavez, an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon. We discuss what social neuroscience is, how social psychology can inform neuroscience, and whether our understanding of the brain can have broader impacts on society.


This is your Brain on Psychology – This is your Psychology on Brain (a guest post by Rob Chavez): https://thehardestscience.com/2018/11/30/this-is-your-brain-on-psychology-this-is-your-psychology-on-brain-a-guest-post-by-rob-chavez/


Niv, Yael. (2020, October 22). The primacy of behavioral research for understanding the brain. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/y8mxe


Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips
In additional to being a mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose is also a physicist and philosopher of science. He received the Nobel prize in Physics this year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0&t=2s

The structure that make up the mitotic spindles are microtubules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule

This week, we have an in-depth conversation with Kat (Kathryn) McCabe, a social ecologist and antiracism educator, about the modern antiracist movement and its potential impact on race relations.


The Change Agency: https://www.thechangeagency.ie

Short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

This week, we discuss the recent controversy surrounding a Nature Communications paper that looks at informal mentorship,  the gender of mentee/mentors, and subsequent scientific impact of the mentees. There has a been a call from the Twitter science community for the retraction of the paper.

Edit: Smriti mentions that someone had tweeted and asked people to email the first author, but it was actually the EIC of Nature Comm:
https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329414989032157185

Paper:
AlShebli, B., Makovi, K. & Rahwan, T.  (2020). The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance. Nat Commun 11, 5855. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19723-8


Reviewer Comments:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-020-19723-8/MediaObjects/41467_2020_19723_MOESM2_ESM.pdf


Some relevant twitter threads:

Open letter to Nature Comm editor-in-chief: https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329455882481131524

https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1329471888180072452

https://twitter.com/MGalvanPsych/status/1329798225331703811

https://twitter.com/DaniSBassett/status/1329417981353467907

https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1329475077071626240

https://twitter.com/psmaldino/status/1329520846054989825

https://twitter.com/daniela_witten/status/1329444294877384706

https://twitter.com/DrBFreeman/status/1329559143884091392



Ali G (Borat) at Cambridge University: https://youtu.be/-93MpfS5ptc?t=43

This week, we talk about the different responses to the election from the left, and what can be done to heal the growing political divide in this country.


Greater Good Science Center, "Bridging Differences Playbook": https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Bridging_Differences_Playbook-Final.pdf

Derek Thompson, "The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race": https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/2020-election-results-prove-density-destiny/617027/

Matthew Yglesias, "Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters should prompt some progressive rethinking": https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21548677/trump-hispanic-vote-latinx

Charles Blow, "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/opinion/election-2020-exit-polls.html

Freelance writer Tim Stone banned from Rock Paper Shotgun, https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1326240111609012224

James Lindsey's tweet criticizing Jonny Sun's tweet criticizing empathy, https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1325474944445272065

This week, we talk to our friend Manuel (Manny) Galvan, a graduate student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the election, political polarization in America, the excesses of the left, cancel culture, BLM/Defund the Police, and Manny's vision of a way forward.


You can find Manny on Twitter @MGalvanPsych; his blog, The Science of Social Problems:  https://scienceofsocialproblems.com/author/scienceofsocialproblems/; and The Pipettepen: http://www.thepipettepen.com/author/mjgalvan/

Cancel culture 

Cancel culture is a significant issue for conservatives: https://theweek.com/articles/928464/cancel-culture-conservative-glass-houses

To some extent the morel panic over Cancel culture is a billionaire-funded operation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/dark-money-behind-campus-speech-wars/

https://prospect.org/justice/care-faux-free-speech-warriors-koch-brothers-paying-bills./

https://fair.org/home/panic-over-cancel-culture-is-another-example-of-right-wing-projection/

https://www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/conservative-dark-money-groups-infiltrating-campus-politics#cr

Empirical evidence of a cancel culture “crisis” on college campuses:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/free-speech-crisis-revisited/

Conservative overrepresentation on social media: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conservatives-social-media-432643 

Berkeley police bias

CPE (Center for Policing Equity) report: https://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Police/Level_3_-_General/CPE%20Draft%20Report%2007142017(2).pdf

Berkeley students call for the defunding of the UCPD: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kyxmd0FpPfFjtogxAz_dgfv4LqmKAjOTw1mN_BvikKo/edit

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/07/23/racial-disparities-in-berkeley-police-stop-data-may-indicate-racial-bias/

Last week, we spoke to our very own faculty advisor, Serena Chen! Serena's the first Asian-American chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Psychology, and one of the most refreshingly candid academics out there. We discuss the recent paper on the future of women in psychological science, on which Serena is a co-author, along with many other female faculty at Berkeley Psych. We also talk about open science, social psych literature, and the future of academia.



Gruber et al. (2020). The Future of Women in Psychological Science: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691620952789?journalCode=ppsa

150 years of Women in Psychology at Berkeley: https://psychology.berkeley.edu/celebrating-150-years-women-psychology-berkeley

This week, we talk to Anne Scheel, a doctoral candidate at the Eindhoven University of Technology, about her upcoming paper Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses.


Scheel, A.M., Tiokhin L., Isager, P.M., & Lakens, D. (in press). Why hypothesis testers should spend less time testing hypotheses. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://psyarxiv.com/vekpu/


Kama Muta (a Sanskrit word!)
Open-access versions of all papers (including the book chapter) on the website: kamamutalab.org

Anne's recommendation for a good place to start:
Fiske, A. P., Seibt, B., & Schubert, T. (2019). The Sudden Devotion Emotion: Kama Muta and the Cultural Practices Whose Function Is to Evoke It. Emotion Review, 11(1), 74–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917723167

Fiske, A. P., Schubert, T., & Seibt, B. (2017). ‘Kama muta’ or ‘being moved by love’: A bootstrapping approach to the ontology and epistemology of an emotion. In J. L. Cassaniti & U. Menon (Eds.), Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture (pp. 79–100). University of Chicago Press. https://repositorio.iscte-iul.pt/handle/10071/16322