The Oddly Absent “Wesearch”

May 23, 2025

You might think that fields would very often apply their own methods to themselves. For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time. Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the repli...

Can you trust survey responses?

March 29, 2025

Self-reporting on surveys seems ridiculously unreliable. People can lie or may not pay attention. People misremember things. People often lack self-insight. And YET, self-reporting fairly often works remarkably well in measuring things. Here are some examples: (1) In a large study we ran, IQ (measured by performance on intelligence tasks) had a strong correlation with self-reported (remembered) performance on the math portion of the SAT exam (r=0.61, n=714), which most participants would hav...

How to Identify ‘Hot Topics’ in Various Fields of Study

April 6, 2018

Ever wonder what the biggest topics are in academic Artificial Intelligence research, or Gender Studies, or Decision Science, or Dental Hygiene research? Want to figure out whether an academic discipline is actually valuable to society, or see some of the most important insights a field has generated in the last five years? Here's my (relatively) easy method for getting a sense of what an academic discipline has been "thinking about" by quickly examining the top two most cited papers from fi...

What is a large correlation? Looking at the sizes of 166 correlations.

January 13, 2018

How large is a "large" correlation when it comes to studying people? Below are 166 (rather interesting!) size-ordered correlations that I calculated on 870 people in the United States, who were recruited using our study recruitment platform, Positly. All responses are self-reported by the study participants, mostly measured on a scale of 1-4 or 1-5, except those that suggest a different scale (e.g., number of minutes doing something, age, symptom scores, etc.) Keep in mind that if A an...

Nature Versus Nurture – Can We Know For Certain?

August 15, 2017

People often want to know the extent to which a trait is genetic versus environmentally determined (e.g., "nature" versus "nurture"). This distinction is not nearly as clear cut as is usually assumed. Let's consider the obvious example of height in a population, a trait that's well known to be purely hereditary. Many causes of a population's height distribution are not hereditary. For example, a population's height is also determined by economic factors, like whether there was malnourishment...