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More social science studies just failed to replicate. Here’s why this is good.
One of the cornerstone principles of science is replication. This is the idea that experiments need to be repeated to find out if the results will be consistent. The fact that an experiment can be replicated is how we know its results contain a nugget of truth. Without replication, we can’t be sure. For the past several years, social scientists have been deeply worried about the replicability of their findings. Incredibly influential, textbook findings in psychology — like the “ego depletion” theory of willpower, or the “marshmallow test” — have been bending or breaking under rigorous retests.
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You 2.0: Originals
Consider this: Frank Lloyd Wright was a procrastinator. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are afraid of taking risks. Most of Beethoven's compositions are pretty awful. Conventional wisdom suggests these originals were successful despite their hemming and hawing, their hedging, and their many flops. But Wharton professor Adam Grant says these defects are actually fundamental to originality. In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them. This week, we bring you our conversation with him as part of our summer series, You 2.0.
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How viral outrage can backfire
In a series of experiments, psychologists at Stanford showed people social media posts that could easily be seen as offensive — for instance, as racist, sexist, unpatriotic, or xenophobic. If the offensive post was shown getting 10 outraged replies, people felt more sympathy toward the author than when it generated only two outraged replies. This was true even when the offender was described as a white supremacist! Yet while third-party observers of these social media pile-ons were relatively sympathetic to the author of the original offensive post, that effect did not hold when people were asked to write their own outraged reply.
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Employees in Open Offices Are More Active, Less Stressed
Digital tools afforded by smartphones and activity trackers allow researchers to study real-world behavior as it happens in the moment.
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The Tyranny of the Exclamation Point Is Causing Email and Text Anxiety
John Witkowski was trying to make some progress on a work project one day this summer when he fired off more than two dozen emails. The 30-year-old tax accountant from Cleveland ended each message with: “Thanks in advance for your help with this project.” The notes caught the attention of his manager, who instant-messaged him: “She was like, ‘You’re not your normal, cheery, bubbly self,’ ” Mr. Witkowski said. “ ‘You’re not using exclamation points.’ ” She told him she felt his emails came off as more demanding than usual. “I didn’t really know how to react,” he said. Exclamation points are stressing people out.
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Singing With My Grandbaby
I can’t explain the first song I crooned to my sleeping granddaughter, just hours old and bundled like a burrito in a hospital blanket and striped cap. Not Brahms, which would have been classy. Not a Yiddish folk tune, though I’d claimed the name Bubbe, Yiddish for grandmother. No, it was a ballad I probably hadn’t deliberately listened to or thought much about in decades: “Surfer Girl,” by the Beach Boys. Maybe it welled up because of the lyrics (“made my heart come all undone”). --- Some folks planned what to sing, but for many of us this music simply emerged, unbidden and unexpected.
