Root Privileges

Tag: Social Psychology

  • The problem with rooting for science

    The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions (‘mathematical objects’ used to understand […]

  • Priggish NEJM editorial on data-sharing misses the point it almost made

    Priggish NEJM editorial on data-sharing misses the point it almost made

    The editorial expresses fear that people who publish in the journal’s pages could be wrong – cleanly forgetting that replication and revalidation are a big part of science.

  • Psych of Science: Hello World

    Hello, world. 🙂 I’m filing this post under a new category on Is Nerd called Psych of Science. A dull name but it’ll do. This category will host my personal reflections on the science in the stories I’ve written or read and, more importantly, of the people in those stories. I decided to create this category after the Social […]

  • Replication studies, ceiling effects, and the psychology of science

    On May 25, I found Erika Salomon’s tweet: Excellent comment thread on replication going on at the SPSP blog http://t.co/9dI72z0LGL — Erika Salomon (@ecsalomon) May 25, 2014 The story started when the journal Social Psychology decided to publish successful and failed replication attempts instead of conventional papers and their conclusions for a Replications Special Issue (Volume 45, […]