Psychology is experiencing what many deem a “crisis,” often called a “replication crisis.” In response and with impressive speed, technical changes are being introduced to remedy perceived problems in data analysis, researcher bias, and publication practices. Yet throughout these large-scale renovations of scientific practice, scarce attention is given to philosophical and theoretical commitments as potential factors in the crisis problems. Analysis of involved psychologists’ understandings of scientific crisis, replication, and epistemology indicates the need for philosophical examinations. Likewise warranting close analyses are the associated assumptions about objectivity, credibility, and ontology (the nature of psychological phenomena). Such lacuna in the crisis interrogations constitute opportunities for researchers with expertise in the philosophy and theory of psychology to contribute to the science’s immediate problems and collaborate more closely with experimental psychologists.

The replication crisis: How might philosophy and theory of psychology be of use?

Identifying relative idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgments is a fundamental challenge to the study of human behavior, yet there is no established method for estimating these contributions. Using edge cases of stimuli varying in intrarater reliability and interrater agreement-faces (high on both), objects (high on the former, low on the latter), and complex patterns (low on both)-we showed that variance component analyses (VCAs) accurately captured the psychometric properties of the data (Study 1). Simulations showed that the VCA generalizes to any arbitrary continuous rating and that both sample and stimulus set size affect estimate precision (Study 2). Generally, a minimum of 60 raters and 30 stimuli provided reasonable estimates within our simulations. Furthermore, VCA estimates stabilized given more than two repeated measures, consistent with the finding that both intrarater reliability and interrater agreement increased nonlinearly with repeated measures (Study 3). The VCA provides a rigorous examination of where variance lies in data, can be implemented using mixed models with crossed random effects, and is general enough to be useful in any judgment domain in which agreement and disagreement are important to quantify and in which multiple raters independently rate multiple stimuli.

/pdf/quantifying-idiosyncratic-and-shared-contributions-to-309zm3xvy8.pdf

Quantifying idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgment.

Rising nationalism on the one hand and anti-racist protests on the other have called into question norms surrounding what can be considered racist. How do individuals decide whether anti-immigrant statements are “racist”? This project sought to identify determinants of agreement about what kind of speech is “racist”. Across two studies and one replication (N = 1211) from a nationally representative panel, perceivers rated how “racist” they found social media statements about immigration. The statements were drawn following the announcement of immigration policies in the United States. We introduce variance component analyses to quantify the extent to which judgments of racism are shared or idiosyncratic. We calculated the contributions of perceiver demographics and attitudes (e.g., racial category, age, gender, political leaning, attitudes toward hierarchy and race), statement attributes (e.g., aggressiveness or target of the statement), and norm cues (e.g., statement popularity) to measure sources of agreement. While traditional aggregate analyses suggested that judgments about what constitutes racism differed on average between racial categories, the variance analyses identified substantial heterogeneity, even within racial categories and when norm cues varied (i.e., number of likes). Some agreement occurred when perceivers shared political and racial ideology, and when the statements contained aggressive messages. Judgments of racism may not be shared within predicted social cleavages (e.g., racial categories) in this particular case, because anti-immigrant sentiment is highly politicized. Mapping variance, compared to only analyzing differences in means, can improve theoretical inferences and avoid “group” essentializing within the psychological study of racism, group-based beliefs, and anti-prejudice endeavors.

/pdf/quantifying-shared-and-idiosyncratic-judgments-of-racism-in-4ghrus2eth.pdf

Quantifying shared and idiosyncratic judgments of racism in social discourse

People who deviate from the established norms of their social group can clarify group boundaries, strengthen group cohesion, and catalyze group and broader social change. Yet social psychologists have recently neglected the study of deviants. We conducted in-depth interviews of Princeton University upperclassmen who deviated from a historical and widely known Princeton norm: joining an “eating club,” a social group that undergraduates join at the end of their sophomore year. We explored the themes of these interviews with two rounds of surveys during the semester when students decide whether to join an eating club (pilot survey, N = 408; and a random subsample of the pilot survey with 90% takeup, N = 212). The surveys asked: what are the social and psychological antecedents of deviance from norms? The data suggest that deviance is a pattern: compared to those who conform, students who deviate by not joining clubs report a history of deviance and of feeling different from the typical member of their social group. They also feel less social belonging and identification with Princeton and its social environment. Students who deviate are lower in self-monitoring, but otherwise are comparable to students who conform in terms of personality traits measured by the Big Five, and of their perception of the self as socially awkward, independent, or rebellious. While some of these findings replicate past research, worth further exploration is the role of previous experience with deviance and its meaning for individuals as they decide whether to deviate.

/pdf/the-social-and-psychological-characteristics-of-norm-3osxt8j7lo.pdf

The Social and Psychological Characteristics of Norm Deviants: A Field Study in a Small Cohesive University Campus

Despite the amount of theorization on the forms and effects of participation, relatively little research directly examines what the concept of workplace participation entails in the minds of employees, and whether employees across cultures think positively when the concept of participation is activated in their mental representation. Three studies (n = 1,138 full-time employees) investigated the perceptions and preferences of full-time employees from the United States and China, cultures that might be expected to differ in their societal participation norm. Using a free association test and text analyses, Study 1 demonstrated that Chinese and American employees differed in their construal of workplace participation, yet both culture groups associated positive valence to the concept of participation. Study 2 showed that employees’ preference for workplace participation is positively related to their perceptions of its outcomes on productivity, job satisfaction, and workplace conflict. Study 3 had employees interact with either a prototypically high or low participation work environment and tested whether clear cultural contrasts might occur. American employees expressed unambiguous endorsement and predicted positive outcomes of a high participation workplace, whereas Chinese employees expressed slightly higher endorsement to a low participation work environment and associated it with higher productivity. This research provides insights on how workplace participation is construed by employees from different cultures, especially from cultures where democratic participation is not the normative default. Different perspectives on workplace participation across cultures may inform practitioners of the goals and approaches when shaping a more participatory workplace and a more democratic society.

Preferences and Perceptions of Workplace Participation: A Cross-Cultural Study

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Sherry Wu

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication