Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for February, 2019

Bertolt Meyer

Guest speaker in this week’s SWE colloquium series is Bertolt Meyer, Director of the Institute of Psychology, TU Chemnitz.

Team fault lines: A meta analysis

Fault lines are hypothetical dividing lines splitting a social group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the distribution of several demographic attributes. Given their theoretical ties with classic theories and concepts from social psychology (e.g., self-categorisation theories) ans sociology (e.g., intersectionality), Fault lines have received widespread scientific attention over the past two decades. However, a comprehensive meta analysis on their effects on performance and team processing is missing. To fill this lacuna, we conducted a meta-analysis over 94 (k) studies from 87 papers with a total sample size (N) of 6,151 teams. We find general support for the negative association between fault lines and team performance. Demographic, deep-level, and perceived fault lines were negatively associated with performance; however, informational and mixed fault lines are not significantly associated with performance. The negative relationship between fault lines and performance is found to occur through high levels of task and relationship conflict and through low levels of team cohesion and team identity. We describe the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for advancing the study of fault lines.

Women in Data Science (WiDS) Basel

We are delighted to announce the first Women in Data Science (WiDS) Basel conference taking place:

Monday, 4 March 2019 (16:00 – 20:00) at the Department of Psychology, Missionsstrasse 64A, 4055 Basel.

WiDS Basel is part of the WiDS initiative that aims to foster gender diversity in the data sciences. WiDS Basel features talks from female speakers in academia and industry who are doing outstanding work at the intersection of data science and Psychology or Economics. The conference aims to inspire and educate people who are curious about or are working in the behavioral sciences using tools from data science. WiDS Basel features talks about career issues, tips and tools for data science, as well as mentoring and networking opportunities. You can find the full program here.

The conference is hosted for the first time in Basel as a joint initiative of members of the Department of Psychology, the Faculty of Business and Economics, and the Bernoulli Network for the Behavioral Sciences of the University of Basel.

Attendance is free but there are limited number of spots with registration on a first-come first-served basis (registration closes 28 February, or earlier if spaces are filled). In order to become a participant of WiDS Basel, please register now on the website.

WiDS Basel Team (Aya Kachi, Jana Jarecki, Rui Mata)

fixing the leaky pipeline

The Journal of Economic Perspectives has recently put out a symposium on “Women in Economics” which discusses among other things the “leaky pipeline” in the discipline, that is, the fact that “the fraction of women in the discipline decreases at each stage along the path from graduate school to the full professor rank” (see the figure above from Lundberg & Stearns, 2019, for institutions in the US). The same likely applies to psychology, given the ratio of female undergrad/grad students to female professors in our discipline (see the figure below from Antoni, 2019, for Germany). 

The piece by Buckles (2019) in the JEP symposium is particularly interesting because it focuses on an evidence-based assessment of strategies for increasing (gender) diversity in economics. It reviews the literature focusing on randomized trials and suggests that there may be something to be gained from different interventions focusing on information (e.g., increasing knowledge about earnings or distribution of grades needed to enter the field), inspiration (e.g., presence and mentoring by female role models), and structural support (e.g., flexible work arrangements, maternity and family leave). It’s good to see that some of these measures are in place at our institution (see Antelope) but Buckles provides a few more ideas that could be implemented… 

[On a methodological note, I find it quite telling of the zeitgeist in economics that Buckles ends her piece by focusing on causal inference: 

“Research in this area faces several challenges to causal identification (emphasis added)—it can be difficult to find reasonable comparison samples, treatments are often bundled, and outcomes can be difficult to measure or take years to be realized. Even in cases where a “gold standard” randomized trial was used to evaluate an intervention, questions about external validity and replicability remain. As a result, we will likely have to try some things without knowing for certain that they will work. (…) But this challenge also presents an opportunity for the profession to put its policy evaluation toolkit to work to advance knowledge, by building evaluation into implementation of policies or by finding creative ways to evaluate interventions after they have occurred. To aid this effort, the AEA (American Economic Association) could create a registry for randomized controlled trials aimed at attracting or retaining women and other underrepresented groups to economics.”]

Antoni, C. H. (2019). Zur Lage der Psychologie. Psychologische Rundschau, 70(1), 4–26. http://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000429

Buckles, K. (2019). Fixing the leaky pipeline: Strategies for making economics work for women at every stage. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(1), 43–60. http://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.1.43

Lundberg, S., & Stearns, J. (2019). Women in economics: Stalled progress. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(1), 3–22. http://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.1.3

jobs

A new update on the jobs available to psychology students suggests that most job announcements for psychologists (in Germany) are in the area of Organizational Psychology, albeit these positions are typically also directed at applicants from other fields, such as economics. Overall, the picture seems similar to the one we reported back in 2015. One should note that many of the positions in clinical psychology are not advertised but rather communicated personally. Regardless, this picture suggests there is a varied set of possible applications of psychology that should be of interest to our graduates in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology.

Antoni, C. H. (2019). Zur Lage der Psychologie. Psychologische Rundschau, 70(1), 4–26. http://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000429

fighting fake facts

Today, I’m attending a conference on “fake facts” taking place at Uni Basel that joins people from journalism/media, industry, and academia to discuss issues related to this oxymoron. From the organisers:

«Fake Facts»: ein Oxymoron, das immer mehr zur bedauernswerten Wirklichkeit wird und die Wissenschaft zunehmend zu untergraben droht. Die Konferenz «F3–Fighting Fake Facts» ist ein Beitrag, um die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft und die Öffentlichkeit für das Problem zu sensibilisieren. Fundierte Fakten und bewiesene Wahrheiten sind das Fundament wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts und die Grundlagen für einen offenen und konstruktiven Dialog.

Website: https://sciforum.net/conference/FightingFakeFacts

The conference raises more questions than it provides answers to fighting “fake facts” but it’s nice to see media and academia coming together to discuss the topic…

open science

Issues of reproducibility (or lack thereof) in psychology have led to calls for increasing transparency in scientific practices.  Loreen Tisdall and I were curious to learn how the topics of reproducibility and open science – “the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional” – are being perceived and tackled by researchers in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology. For this purpose, we conducted an internal survey inspired by the Swiss Open Psychological Science Initiative asking about researcher’s awareness/experience as well as attitudes to a number of open science practices.

We received 19 responses to the following two questions…

1. Which of the following research practices are you aware of, and which do you have experience of using or doing?

2. How important do you believe the following practices are for optimising the reproducibility and efficiency of research in your field?

Our reading of these results is…

  • there is considerable awareness of open science practices in Social, Economic and Decision Psychology, albeit only few individuals report high levels of expertise with these practices.
  • there is considerable importance attributed to open science practices in increasing reproducibility and efficiency in our field, but there is clearly some variance of opinions, in particular concerning a few of the practices (e.g., registered reports, many analysts, preprints).

We discussed some of these issues during the latest meeting of the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology doctoral program. There appears to be consensus for a continued discussion and establishing of common guidelines and training regarding open science in our groups – stay tuned…