Dr. Simine Vazire

Dr. Vazire & Ethical Analyses

Dr. Vazire was born in France and grew up in Palo Alto, VA, and is currently the Director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge Laboratory at UC Davis. She teaches courses on research methods, replicability, personality, and self-knowledge. She also conducts meta-science examining how people interpret scientific findings and tracks trends in the methods and results of published studies in psychology over time. She is a Senior Editor at Collabra: Psychology, Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPSS), and Co-Founder and President of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS).

In this spotlight, we talk about Dr. Vazire's research around statistical analyses and how to make them more rigorous and transparent. A lot of our class discussion focused on the ethics of collecting data, but it's also important to be ethical when analyzing data.

(source)

Interview with Dr. Vazire

Interviewer: Describe your research in five words.

Dr. Vazire: Transparency, replicability, methods, personality, self-knowledge

INT: Ok, now tell us more.

Vazire: One line of my research examines how we can make psychological methods more rigorous. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of reforms (e.g., pre-registration, transparency, etc.) for producing more robust results. We do this by examining methodological trends in published research (sample size, p-curve, construct validity) before and since the "credibility revolution" in psychology.

My other line of research examines how well people know their own personality. We compare self-reports of personality traits and states to peer reports and actual behavior, to estimate the accuracy of people's self-views. Do people know how they typically behave? Do they know how they behaved in the last hour? How well do self-perceptions agree with others' perceptions of a person? We use a variety of methods to test these questions.

INT: If you weren’t a psychological scientist, what field would you be in?

Vazire: Maybe science journalism – the best science journalists are critics who help make the science better by holding scientists accountable for their claims. Ideally, we would have more of that within science, but there isn't much incentive for scientists to verify and correct each other, so it often falls to journalists to help identify or bring to light flaws in science.

We need these critics in order to be able to claim that science prioritizes self-correction, and to keep making science better.

INT: What is the most common misconception about your research?

Vazire: I think a common misconception about replicability research is that those of us who do it are motivated by a desire to tear down the classic findings. In reality, my motivation is that I want to know what is true, what we can count on, what we should be teaching our students, and I no longer trust the standards of evidence that we had in the past, so I am skeptical of many classic findings.

I also have come to see that status and hierarchy play a bigger role in whose findings become well-known than I had imagined when I was just starting out, and that also contributes to my skepticism about effects that had been considered well-established. So, I guess the misconception is that my skepticism is fueled by negativity – it's fueled more by seeing how the incentives in publishing and career success work (or don't).

(source)(full comic)

Reflection Questions

In the above interview, the comic, and the article excerpt to the right (click here to read the full article) Dr. Vazire talks about 'p-hacking'. Based on what you've read here (or elsewhere, if you're familiar with the topic) what is p-hacking?
How does the practice of p-hacking violate the ethical codes of psychological research?
As we continue in the class, we'll talk more about p-values and how to evaluate them as a consumer of research. With the information you have now, how do you feel about psychological research after learning about p-hacking? Do you trust it more, less, or the same, and why or why not?

vazire_edited.pdf

Google Sites

Report abuse