Category: Science

  • Book Review: Everybody Lies

    I rarely read pop-sci books, and I even more rarely review books in any form. However, I bought „Everybody Lies“ some months ago and just finished reading it. It took me about four months to read it, partly because it made me so angry as a researcher reading it.

  • Introduction to Bayesian Statistics (Slides in German)

    Recently, I had the opportunity to give a lecture on Bayesian statistics to a semester of Psychology Master students at the University of Bonn. The slides, which are in German, I’d like to share here for interested readers. 

  • ReplicationBF: An R-Package to calculate Replication Bayes Factors

    Some months ago I’ve written a manuscript how to calculate Replication Bayes factors for replication studies involving F-tests as is usually the case for ANOVA-type studies. After a first round of peer review, I have revised the manuscript and updated all the R scripts. I have a written a small R-Package to have all functions…

  • Thoughts on the Universality of Psychological Effects

    Most discussed and published findings from psychological research claim universality in some way. Especially for cognitive psychology it is the underlying assumption that all human brains work similarly — an assumption not unfounded at all. But also findings from other fields of psychology such as social psychology claim generality across time and place. It is…

  • Critiquing Psychiatric Diagnosis

    I came across this great post at the Mind Hacks blog by Vaughan Bell, which is about how we talk about psychiatric diseases, their diagnosis and criticising their nature. Debating the validity of diagnoses is a good thing. In fact, it’s essential we do it. Lots of DSM diagnoses, as I’ve argued before, poorly predict…

  • Stop the “Flipping”

    Stop the “Flipping”

    I came across this interesting article at The Thesis Whisperer blog. It starts with the hypothesis being an academic is similar to “running a small, not very profitable business”. This is mainly down to two problems: Problem one: There are a lot of opportunities that could turn into nothing, so it’s best to say yes…

  • New Preprint: A Bayes Factor for Replications of ANOVA Results

    New Preprint: A Bayes Factor for Replications of ANOVA Results

    Already some weeks ago I have finished up some thoughts for a Replication Bayes factor for ANOVA contexts, which resulted in a manuscript that is available as pre-print at arXiv. The theoretical foundation was laid out before by Verhagen & Wagenmakers (2014) and my manuscript is mainly an extension of their approach. We have another paper…

  • New Paper: Impulsivity and Completion Time in Online Questionnaires

    New Paper: Impulsivity and Completion Time in Online Questionnaires

    I’ve got my first first-author-paper published in Personality and Individual Differences. The paper is titled “Reliability and completion speed in online questionnaires under consideration of personality” (doi:10.1016/j.paid.2017.02.015) and was written together with Lina and Christian. 

  • Research is messy: Two cases of pre-registrations

    Research is messy: Two cases of pre-registrations

    Pre-registrations are becoming increasingly important for studies in psychological research. This is a much needed change since part of the “replication crisis” has to do with too much flexibility in data analysis and interpretation (p-hacking, HARK’ing and the like). Pre-registering a study with planned sample size and planned analyses allows other researchers to understand what…

  • How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next

    This is an interesting article from The Guardian on “post-truth” politics, where statistics and “experts” are frowned upon by some groups. William Davies shows how statistics in the political debate have evolved from the 17th century until today, where statistics are not regarded as an objective approach to reality anymore but as an arrogant and…