The new F-word: Who wants to be a feminist?

               Il semble qu’il soit difficile de s’identifier en tant que femme féministe. De nombreuses études empiriques ont en effet mis en avant le déséquilibre entre femmes adhérant aux idées féministes et la criante minorité s’identifiant comme telle. Ainsi donc, il apparaît que les attitudes positives envers le discours féministe et le self-labelling sont des phénomènes distincts. Cela nous amène à passer en revue les éléments qui facilitent ou entravent cette auto-identification.

 

              

Science, Open data, and your Privacy

If you are a regular reader of this blog, chances are you are either a fellow (social) psychologist or somebody with an above-average interest in social psychology. In both cases, you have likely heard of the “replication crisis” or, as I have recently heard it called on a podcast dedicated almost entirely to the topic, the “transparency revolution” (episode 57). The second is my favorite by far, for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post.

Data safe from hackers, but certainly not "open access": punch-card storage from the 1950

If you haven’t heard of it, this post will hopefully still make sense, but if you would like to read up on roughly what is going on, I recommend these two summaries of the situation. A very brief description of the situation (and all you need to know for understanding this post) is that we, as a scientific community, realized that the way we do science, i.e. how we hypothesize, set up experiments, test participants, analyze data and publish results, did not often lead to reliable, robust results (Open Science Collaboration, 2015, Klein et al., 2017). This is not very productive for both our scientific field nor those who pay for our research (most likely you, the taxpayer) in the long term. If by now you are worried about your favorite psychological effect, you can check whether it still holds up here.

As the problem cannot be tracked down to one single culprit, neither a specific person nor one single step of the scientific process, there are many different attempts to continually improve the way we conduct our work. Calls to address publication bias, improve theoretical reasoning (link to pdf), pre-registration to avoid digging for results and justifying them only after they were found (known as p-hacking and harking), more participants per experiment and more replications, better or entirely new statistical methods, using new tools designed for a transparent research process like the open science framework… the list goes on.
One of the puzzle pieces scientists interested in seeing better, more reliable research practices are championing is the practice of open access to anonymised experimental and survey data. This practice is called “open data”, and yes, you can get a badge for it: