Jeff Lees (@leesplez.bsky.social)
@Leesplez
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Assistant Professor in OB at the University of Groningen | psychology of leadership, sustainability, and misperceptions | #rstats | he/they | 🇺🇸→🇳🇱
Groningen, Nederland
Joined April 2011
I'm mostly gonna be on BlueSky for the foreseeable future [at]
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.@PressSec: "In the coming weeks, we will release more details about our plans. A smooth transition back into repayment is a high priority for the administration."
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Ask yourself how many tenured, white professors have publicly said black people have lower IQ scores b/c of their genetics, and have never received any official condemnation on this level, ever. 1/2.
A statement regarding recent social media posts by Uju Anya.
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And Twitter, unbelievably, removed her Tweet. The number of literal Nazis who flourish on this website make clear that Twitter is more concerned about policing speech critical of the powerful than anything close to consistent enforcement of "community guidelines" 2/2.
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Yea my Instagram isn't loading any photos. but of course the advertisements are loading just fine.
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Dear elite Universities, if you're running one-year Master's programs targeted at aspiring PhD students which have $60,000+ tuitions where 90% of courses are taught by adjuncts, and you offer zero financial scholarships, what you're doing is intentionally exploitative and immoral.
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*Long Thread on my Academic Job Market Experience*. In 10 days I start my new tenure-track position, a position that took me 5 years on the academic job market to get . I wanna talk about my (miserable) experience on the market, and a few takeaways for those on it now.
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This is a masterclass in deceptive statistics, using one of the most common deceptive techniques: relative change across unequal groups. Note the legend on the top left, and that teenage girls in 2020 (post "sudden change") still have the *lowest rate* of all groups. .
This is what I've been trying to say: when you merge everyone and everything, you often find nothing. But when you zoom in on teen girls (especially in early puberty) you usually find a sudden change between 2010 and 2015.
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Are you on a faculty hiring committee? Do you care about being humane to applicants? Here are some tips (from an applicant):. 1. Just ask for a CV, cover letter, and writing sample to start. ask for teaching/research/DEI statements, references, etcetera for a select pool. 1/5.
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Dear Editors,. If you find a reviewer leaving comments like this, send them a private email telling them that if they cannot be professional in reviews, they are not welcome to submit manuscripts in the future.
I am truly hurt by a comment received from a reviewer today, and it even makes me wonder if I should continue to seek PhD programs.
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@ericneumannpsyc Write as if someone can read only the first sentence of every paragraph and fully comprehend every point you make. This advice radically changed how I draft papers: I outline an entire paper by writing each paragraph's 1st sentence, then 2-3 bullets that'll support the sentence.
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"Paper is done! Time to just tidy up the code. " . [Finds massive error in code]
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If there's one brain disease I swear all psychologists have, it's one that causes them to spend years of their life developing their own scale, then publishing it without an accessible, final version anywhere in the manuscript or online.
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Hot take (from personal experience): HARKing for me has been entirely an issue of peer-review. I constantly find I am punished for being honest about exploratory analyses or findings at odds with original hypotheses. Implausibly clean, hand-waving "theory" is what reviewers want.
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I'm loathed to defend economists, but this (very real) pay gap is b/c they've disabused themselves of two toxic ideas other social sciences still hold to: . (1) Everyone entering a PhD should strive for academics jobs.(2) Non-academic jobs are inferior to academic ones. 1/2.
We are all doing the same job. We teach the same number of classes. I don't think my labor is worth $20,000 LESS than that of my econ colleagues. More money please.
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Last caveat: If you're looking for a "DEi ruined my chances as a white dude" rant, look elsewhere . Current DEI initiatives are meager bandaids to systemic injustices that still advantage people like me, and I have nothing but solidarity for my colleagues of color.
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I have taken courses at 5 universities and taught courses at 4. and what is presented here as unique and profound is in fact a pedestrian experience on every campus I've been on. And to be clear, that's good! . But the grift here is claiming to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
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Taking off for Amsterdam, then onward to Groningen. Leaving my homeland for a new life in the Netherlands! 😁🇳🇱
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This Fall I'm starting as an Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior at the University of Groningen! . I'm extremely excited to be in the Netherlands and starting this new academic and personal journey 😊
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This article is bad. As someone who studies intergroup relations, I'm getting tired of seeing this argument blaming all our problems on "tribalism" repeated near-weekly for 4 years in the opinion pages of elite media. Let me explain.
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5. Have someone on the committee actually try to submit an app. You'd be shocked at how many application processes *do not match* what the app says. "Optional" materials/references' contact that are actually required, materials that aren't even mentioned, etcetera. 4/5.
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Economists support their students going into industry, and believe academic jobs need to *compete* with industry to attract economists, which is why they pay their faculty more. Academics who sneer at PhD students going into industry are gaslighting their own salaries.
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2. Never, under any circumstance, ask for something unique. Don't ask for written responses to pet questions, don't put arbitrary page limits otherwise standard materials, don't ask for combined statements, don't ask for a form to be filled out. Don't, ever. 2/5.
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WTF. Mike does amazing work, qualitatively. This is undeserved. Quantitatively, Mike's published ~29 articles since he got to Yale, one about every four months (and ~33 pubs prior to arriving). If that's not enough to get tenure, then what is?.
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🚨 Life Update 🚨 . This August I'll be joining @elkeweber's lab in the @AndlingerCenter & @PrincetonSPIA as an associate research scholar, studying climate change denial and social norms around environmental sustainability (among other things). I'm wicked excited 😁.
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6. Lastly, put info about the committee decision process. If you're going to make interview decisions by Date X, let people know in the app. Don't leave people hanging. Most apps I've experienced don't do most of these things. If you do even half, you're in the minority. 5/5.
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Because the base rate for young girls is so low, even *very small* absolute changes will look like relatively large swings compared to the groups with much larger base rates. If the rate in 2020 is 3.5, and that's a 40% increase compared to the baseline, do the math and. .
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Like climate and election deniers, transphobes invoke "debates" and "questions" that do not exist and only represent their bad faith attempts to push unfounded narratives into the mainstream.
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@curaffairs "It wasn't the deeply held belief that greed is good, it was an unwillingness to put people's health above the pursuit of profits"
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My partner gave birth to a healthy baby last night, our Helen. Everyone is good and healthy! Thanks to everyone for you support.
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3. Include relevant job information. What's the teaching load? What's the salary range? What's the topic area you're looking to hire in?. 4. Include relevant application information. When is the application due? What materials will be asked for in the application portal? . 3/5.
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@eduleadership Ah, no dude. I'm saying that if you take the most absolutist version of Haidt's argument, you're looking at only 163 deaths per year, less than half the death count of pool drownings in the US. And Haidt has no evidence that very small increase is caused by social media/phones.
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There is nothing else to say other than it's a truly awful experience, even when you "succeed," and it reflects the larger structural issues in academia, in mentorship, and in the labor market. Sorry for the bummer.
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a book about gender-based online harassment isn't going to sell as well as blaming the technology on which it happens. So instead we're treated to a litany of tortured statistics and unfounded inferences.
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But b/c there are *so few* jobs and so many applicants, you're gonna see all the people who were lucky enough to be studying the right thing at the right time get jobs while you don't. You learn that "fit" drives most hiring, and "fit" is all vibes masquerading as "merit".
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Dissertation defended! Dr. Lees it is 😁. Thank you to my amazing committee, @francescagino, @profcikara, and Adam Waytz, for all your help in making this great effort a success! . If anyone's interested, link to the slides 👇.
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My paper with the amazing @profcikara in @NatureHumBehav is now published online! We find that people significantly overestimate outgroup negativity toward the collective competitive behavior of their ingroup. Preprint in the followup tweet.
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If Haidt's book were titled "phones/social media are bad sometimes" then this would be good evidence, but it's not. He's making grand claims about "rewiring" of kids brains, then large causal claims about societal shifts, then calling for significant government intervention. .
A review in Nature, by @candice_odgers, asserts that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” Both of these assertions are untrue.
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Meaning social media/phones are (hypothetically) responsible for ~163 teenage girls' suicides per year. To put that into perspective, gun homicides claimed ~1,368 teenagers (boys and girls) in 2020, and unlike social media, the causal link there isn't dubious.
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Today is my 6th wedding anniversary. 6 years as a husband, first year as a dad ❤️
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A reactionary centrist has to propose abstract hypotheticals about what happens in college classrooms in order to reinforce moral panics they make a living complaining about b/c they cannot demonstrate the imaged issue actually exists at scale. At what point do you block them?.
A prof uses their position in a course to advance social justice as they see it. They're engaged in: 1) fulfilling a moral obligation; 2) a righteous choice 3) a defensible choice 4) a suspect choice 5) an unethical choice 6) an abuse of power. What does your answer turn on?.
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Fellow #psychology people, I need your help . I know "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" isn't validated, and is a "zombie theories" that persists outside of psychology . But what is a validated alternative? Names, literatures, and any suggestions for directions to look are welcomed!.
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My partner Becca and I are expecting our first child in late August, baby Helen. We're very excited, and very grateful to all our family and friends for their support ❤️ . Happy #MothersDay.
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Takeaway #4: The market is a lottery. When you've been on the market for 5+ years, you realize this, and honestly it's hard for it not to breed resentment. You're gonna see 27 year olds with zero pubs get Ivy TT jobs, while you're ~12 pubs get you nothing. You're gonna see. .
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I'm on the tenure-track job market this Fall! . I study *belief traps* – the gap between our perceptions of the social world and reality – and how these inaccurate beliefs drive negative outcomes for organizations, politics, and the environment. 1/3.
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This means the baseline for young girls in 2003 is 2.5 (per 100,000). Meaning that assuming social media and phones caused this *entire increase* (and not regression to the mean or gendered harassment online), then they're responsible for a 1 per 100,000 increase. .
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Takeaway #3: The market is an awful experience. It's difficult to describe the mental weight of the precarity and uncertainty the market thrusts you into. Even under "ideal" circumstances it's 6 month between submission and job acceptance. .
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all these places say the "care about" interdisciplinary research, only to be told by hiring committees you don't fit the mold. You're gonna spend hours stressing over a single app, only to hear through the grapevine they wanted a single person and you absolutely wasted your time.
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So what's the takeaway? The academic market is a lottery that for most takes years of personal sacrifice to succeed in and causes massive detriments to your mental health. Be strategic AF, get a therapist, talk to your partner and advisor about expectations, and seek support.
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Get a therapist. If you're in a steady relationship get a couple's therapist. The strain is immense and totalizing. You'll be depressed for months on end. I *can't remember* the last time I had a Christmas when I wasn't deeply depressed b/c of the market.
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Me, circa 10:50pm: "I really should go to bed.". Me, circa 11:10pm: "What does 'maximum likelihood estimation' really mean? [opens Google]".
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Just got a rejection, and here's the first reason stated by the action editor: . "Your finding is consistent with the theoretical framework, therefore your findings do not advance theory.". One wonders why management scholarship has more "theories" than stars in the sky.
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Ask yourself if that increase is particularly meaningful compared to the absolute base rates of other groups. and again, that's assuming social media/phones caused the entirety of that change. According to the Federal Gov there's ~16,290,000 girls age 10-17 in the USA in 2020. .
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Can someone explain why "a calling" necessitates having no power within an institution? The idea that being intrinsically motivated means you have to accept domination is bullsh*t, motivated (per his admission) by the desire to extract value from underlings' work. Total nonsense.
Graduate students are primarily students and trainees, not ordinary workers. Academia is a calling. I suspect unionization will tip the balance so faculty prefer, at the margin, to hire post-docs to do research in their labs rather than students.
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Takeaway #1: The market is a massive time sink. In the Fall just applying for the jobs can easily take 5-10% of your time over 2-4 months. Preparing materials can easily be weeks worth of work, and fly outs easily consume a whole week by themselves.
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But for those of us who are not "rockstars, it's *years* of uncertainly and depression. Apps due in Sept, by Dec the realization you're not getting a TT job hits, Jan-April is a desperate death march through the secondary TT/post-doc market, rinse and repeat for 4 f*cking years.
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Editors: Why can't we find reviewers?. Me, a reviewer trying to access manuscript central:. "ERROR: You cannot access the manuscript until you fill in the following field: Fax Number".
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SPSP: How does your research combat structural inequality?. Also SPSP: Do you want a "legacy" badge denoting connections to famous faculty???
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I'll gesture back to something I said earlier. If someone told you "online harassment of young girls had caused about 150 more girls to commit suicide every year in the US compared before social media," would that seem reasonable? I certainly think so, but unfortunately. .
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Psychologist here. mandates are very convincing, not merely in a coercive but in a moral sense. People update their normative beliefs based on what is required of them. Not mandating something conveys to people that the behavior isn't that important.
Mandates are stupid. As are vax passports. Ask any psychologist, game theorist, or person who has run a business. We are more collectively compliant when we are CONVINCED and not shamed.
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This isn't to say people who "don't deserve" the job get hired. *Most* people competing for these jobs are well qualified scholars who deserve their positions. It's just that there are 5 of those people for every 1 job. So once you pass a threshold of competence, it's a lottery.
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In total, over these 5 years, I applied to 329 TT jobs in primarily OB, but also in psych and other disciplines. Over that time I got 7 1st round interviews, 2 fly outs (both in the 5th year), and 1 TT offer (which I took, at Groningen in OB). So my interview rate was 2.1%.
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Easily the best Likert scale I've ever developed
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Being on the market is going to tank your productivity. I had several project I had to put on hold for 4-6 months just to get through applications and interviews. Plan for this. And if you're an advisor, give your students the room they need.
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As a misinfo researcher I'm no fan of Rogan. but I also suspect the difference between the US and other countries with much better vax rates isn't that they lack local Rogan types, it's that they have well functioning, well funded, and publicly trusted healthcare systems.
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My personal fav is when I learned that "IV" and "Covariate" are the same thing statistically, it's really just a statement of what one cares about.
Statistics terminology is truly unhinged. Different names for the same terms across fields. The same names for different things across fields. Common language terms applied in highly specialized ways. Two similar terms used to mean entirely opposite concepts.
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One of the first gun laws in South Carolina was the "Security Act" of 1739, which required all white men to (1) own a gun and (2) bring it to church on Sunday!. Why?. Because slaves tended to revolt on Sundays while everyone was at church.
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🚨 In-Press Article 🚨. I'm excited to share my forthcoming article in PNAS, titled "People Like Sex.". In it, we investigate an oft ignored social phenomenon, and ask whether it's objectively true that people like having sex. Our results have profound implication for. 1/36.
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I already live the "socially distanced" academic life. I'm ABD, work from home 4.5/5 days of the week, and live an hour from campus. As such, I've learned a lot about working from home over the last two years. So here's my: . *Tips for Academics Now Working Primarily From Home*.
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If you need more evidence the media is going to bend over backwards to exalt DeSantis as the ascendant GOP leader, look no further than this nonsense. Horse Race Framing: Mass Death Edition.
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It's now official, I've accepted a Visiting Assistant Professorship at @ClemsonUniv, where I'll be researching the psychology of disinformation in collaboration w/ @plwarre and @DarrenLinvill!.
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There's nothing quite like generating totally random responses to your survey and finding evidence for one of your main hypothesis (p = 0.014) to remind you that false-positives are very real.
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Just signed the paperwork, I'm now a Fellow @GWIDDP where I'll be working on computational approaches to tracking and combatting election-related misinformation with my fabulous collaborators @killianmcl1 and @carol_coimbra2.
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These people have one shtick that will never cease (despite the dearth of evidence to support it) b/c it involves stoking the anxieties of credulous, reactionary elites obsessed with casting all social progress, no matter how modest, as symbolic death throes of the social order.
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A typology of #bropenscience personalities:. 1) The Uninvited Contrarian.2) The Vindicated Reactionary.3) The Truth-Bully. These archetypes tend to correlate, but represent different psychological dynamics worth exploring:. 1/n.
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The "because tribalism" explanation does not answer *any* of the questions we actually care about: Why is one party, but not the other, descending into authoritarianism? Why now, but not in the past? Who is more likely to support said authoritarianism? And how do we combat it?.
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#psych #openscience #stats folks:. Can you recommend a good paper on why (1) MANOVAs are bad, and (2) what should replace them? . And yes, this is for a review I'm doing. I want to give the authors concrete suggestions for alternative to MANOVAs.
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🚨 New Pub in @PNASNexus 🚨. w/ Haley Todd and Max Barranti. Open Access DOI: The title really says it all, but allow me to elaborate!. 1/n
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A massive international replication and extension of my 2020 NHB w/ @profcikara on misperceptions and polarization was just published in NHB (👇). I have so much to say about this project, and so much to be thankful for! . 1/n. #OpenScience #psychology .
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SEM is just a glorified correlation matrix.
What's your most controversial data opinion?.
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Moreover, the market is very trend driven. At least in OB, post-2008 crash it was behavioral ethics, then post-2016 election is was disinformation, then post George Floyd's murder it was DEI, now post ChatGPT it's AI and computational methods. That's not inherently bad. .
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This is the source of an incredible amount of precarity. I almost left academia b/c I had family members I took care of and therefore couldn't relocate for my 2nd post-doc, so I had to be remote. I had at least one offer rescinded by Deans who wanted to go back in-person in 2022.
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Hard no for me. The purpose of IRBs is to protect the rights of participants. Asking them to also police research quality (something they rarely have training in) cannot go well. Unless the IRB is going to offer funds to increase sample sizes, it should stick to its job.
Question:.Imagine you’re on a university IRB/ethics panel and notice that you often receive applications for underpowered studies. At what point does sample size become something the IRB should consider? Where is the line between bad design that is vs. isn’t an ethics issue?.
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Takeaway #2: The market is a multi-year time sink. I don't think I'm much of an outlier having done 4 years of post-doc-ing. The two post-docs who previously worked in my lab at Princeton had similarly 4+ of post-PhD experience before getting TT jobs.
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Citing "tribalism" allows for the performative objectivity, shallow analyses, and false equivalencies that characterize the putatively "non-political" worldview of elite journalism (you'll note this very article is chock-full of such both-sides-isms).
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I'm less concerned about the Joseph Epsteins writing in opinion pages than I am about the Joseph Epsteins serving on hiring, tenure, and promotion committees, journal editorial boards, and as advisors/mentors 😡.
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"We conducted a 3x3x2 between-subjects MANOVA" 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩.
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The job market is utterly miserable and I don't wanna sugarcoat that. But I don't wanna be all doom and gloom either, so here's a good sign from the OB job sheet that jobs are coming back: . Job Posts by 8/1 in 2019: 101.Job Posts by 8/1 in 2020: 75.Job Posts by 8/1 in 2021: 155.
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I wanna give a shoutout to @annemscheel. A week ago she wrote an article expressing worry about the speed at which COVID related psych studies were being run, and that we might be sacrificing our scientific standards in pursuit of "rapid" (and putatively impactful) research.
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Today's my first day as a post-doc @Princeton + @AndlingerCenter, working with @elkeweber!. I'm very excited for the new position, and grateful to have worked with @ClemsonHub over the past two years 😁.
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can I officially call myself a "computational social scientist" now?
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Writing job market materials is so miserable it makes me actually want to write my manuscript drafts.
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Some caveats: . I don't know how representative I am as a scholar, I'm in OB but am pretty psych-y and do lots of interdisciplinary work. I don't know how representative my experience is, the pandemic hit my 1st year, my advisor was outed as a fraud, and I had family constraints.
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Can anyone point me to recent papers which have (1) a small sample size, but (2) have many repeated-measures/trials, and are therefore still highly powered to detect within-person effects? . #psych #OpenScience.
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@TheMorgenroth Playing tabletop RPGs (e.g. D&D) gave me a better intuitive understanding of statistics than any course I ever took. Rolling lots of critical-failures on a d20 is perhaps the best way to truly understand what p < 0.05 means.
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So can we please stop publishing this very argument ad nauseam? As someone who studies polarization, understanding its dynamics are important. But those dynamics don't tell us why we're on our slow descent into right-wing authoritarianism.
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For all the ECRs (and all academics). One thing I learned while organizing this workshop, and especially in choosing who to invite, is that you *NEED to have a baseline online presence*. You have *no idea* how many opportunities you're missing b/c folks cannot find you online.
This past weekend we hosted "The Euro-American Interdisciplinary Workshop on Disinformation" at @ClemsonUniv. Cosponsored by the @WattCenter and @NATO Public Diplomacy, we brought together an amazing group of scholars to talk about their research. Let me tell you about it!.
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