Two Psychologists Four Beers

Sergio Barbosa (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá) and Alma Jeftic (International Christian University, Tokyo) join Yoel to talk about big team science. We talk about some of the problems that can come up when you are trying to collect data in many countries around the world, including how constructs might need to be measured differently and how ethics committees in different countries can have really different ideas about what is a problematic question. Sergio and Alma explain the terms "majority world" and "minority world," and how researchers in poorer countries are sometimes relegated to being 65th author on a 100-author paper. We also talk about some possible fixes: blind review of project proposals, leaving equipment and skills behind after a project ends, and projects led by researchers from outside the West. Finally, Alma and Sergio tell Yoel about ABRIR, the network Alma helped found to bring majority-world researchers into big team science, and Sergio's upcoming Psychological Science Accelerator project on social evaluation.

Also, Sergio makes some very tasty cocktails while Yoel drinks like a beer and a half.

Special Guests: Alma Jeftic and Sergio Barbosa.

Links:

• CONNECT partners | CONNECT partnership
• ABRIR - ABRIR
• PSA 10 - Social Evaluation
• Demain Berlin · Guerre Froide

Harvard psychologist and philosopher Josh Greene joins the show to talk about his influential work in moral psychology and why he has partly moved from basic science to applied projects. We talk about two ways he's trying to apply his research to change the real world. The first is Giving Multiplier, a donation platform that nudges people towards higher-impact giving (listeners can get extra matching funds on Giving Multiplier by visiting https://givingmultiplier.org/invite/BEERS). The second is Tango, an online interactive quiz game that gets Democrats and Republicans to like each other a little better.

Let's hope Mickey never finds out that this episode features zero (0) alcoholic drinks. Josh drinks some fancy adult sodas, and Yoel, who is less fancy, drinks a Red Bull.

Also, the question everyone has been asking: is Josh a moral realist?

Special Guest: Josh Greene.

Sponsored By:

• Giving Multiplier: Listeners get extra matching funds on Giving Multiplier!

Links:

• Boosting the impact of charitable giving with donation bundling and micromatching | Science Advances
• Defusing political animosity in the United States with a cooperative online quiz game | Nature Human Behaviour
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

Andy Masley joins Yoel and Mickey to talk about a claim that's made him (in)famous: using AI chatbots doesn't meaningfully affect your carbon footprint or water usage. We discuss what data centers actually do with water, why "ten times a Google search" is not a useful metric, and why people really don't want data centers built near them.

We also talk about Andy's involvement in effective altruism, which criticisms of it he takes seriously, and whether a grant from an EA funder should make you trust him less. Plus, some self-driving car discourse, and Yoel tries to drink a bottle of bourbon.

Finally, a small correction from Andy: "I misspoke at 48:00 and said you'd need to send 150,000 prompts to raise your emissions by 1%, I got my wires crossed with how much you'd need to double your emissions and the actual number should be 1,500 per day."

Special Guest: Andy Masley.

Links:

• Andy Masley | Substack
• What are the most pressing world problems? | 80,000 Hours
• Colossus 1
• No Data Centers In My Backyard - by Jasmine Sun
• In Due Course | Joseph Heath | Substack
• Home - Vaclav Smil
• Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air
• 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report
• United States Data Center Energy Usage Report: 2025 Update
• Tree House Brewing Company
• Fairweather Brewing Company – Craft Brewery in Hamilton, Ontario

Paul and Yoel talk about whether it's a problem that psychologists seem to be no better than laypeople at predicting behavior. We also cover a recent controversy in anthropology, talk a little bit about the Odyssey (movie), and discuss whether people ought to be drinking more.

(Sorry about the clicking in Paul's audio--we did what we could to tone it down!)

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

Links:

• Did Carolyn Rouse Make Things Worse? - by Evan Goldstein
• Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?
• Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? We Questioned Its Authors.
• Why the Healthiest Generation Is the Loneliest
• Simple models predict behavior at least as well as behavioral scientists
• Insights into the accuracy of social scientists’ forecasts of societal change | Nature Human Behaviour
• If you're so smart - by Paul Bloom - Small Potatoes
• Should I trust economists? - by Daniel Greco
• The idea of primitive communism is as seductive as it is wrong | Aeon Essays
• The Stroke of Return - YouTube

Cognitive scientist Molly Crockett joins the show to talk about what it's like to be known in the field as an "AI skeptic." We talk about where Molly is actually skeptical, but also what she thinks that label gets wrong. Along the way, we cover a bunch of other things too: Molly's research in social neuroscience, computational modeling, and moral psychology; Molly and Mickey's disagreements about empathic AI; and Molly's case for what she's calling "thick empathy." Finally, Molly makes a pitch for non-alcoholic beer, which sadly falls on deaf ears.

Special Guest: Molly Crockett.

Links:

• OSF | The pitfalls of pay-to-play morality
• AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science: Trends in Cognitive Sciences
• Replication for Language Models
• GUIDE-LLM: Reporting checklist for studies with large language models in the behavioral and social sciences
• Do Artifacts Have Politics? on JSTOR
• CITP Seminar:Janet Vertesi - Where Fairness Fails: How to Confront Material Political Economy of AI - YouTube
• \Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability
• UK quietly increases AI emissions forecast 100-fold – POLITICO
• The carbon and water footprints of data centers and what this could mean for artificial intelligence: Patterns
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change: Naomi Oreskes: Bloomsbury Publishing - Bloomsbury
• The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
• More Everything Forever by Adam Becker | Hachette Book Group
• AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett | The Guardian
• Empathy, Thick and Thin by M.J. Crockett
• In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
• The Last Human Job | Princeton University Press
• Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research | Nature
• Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus | Nature

Researcher, professor, and former Division III football player Nick Epley joins the show to talk about why we underestimate the benefits of social connections. We are a social species, and yet many of us choose to avoid connecting with others. Nick and I talk about his research on this, and about his new book, A Little More Social, which is all about how we can change our behavior to connect more with others.

Special Guest: Nick Epley.

Links:

• Nicholas Epley
• A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection: Epley, Nicholas: 9780593319543: Amazon.com: Books
• Strangers - YouTube

Instead of a new episode this month, we have one from the vaults that many newer listeners might not have heard (because it came out almost 7 years ago). But, especially since Paul has a new baby (see first link), re-releasing this one seemed fitting. And it's always been one of my favorites. We'll be back with new episodes in the coming months.

Original Episode Description

Yoel and Mickey welcome Paul Bloom to the podcast, who is not only a returning guest but also the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. We first give terrible advice on parenting. Does parenting affect happiness, relationship satisfaction, and meaning? Does parenting screw with prospective decision making because it leaves the decision maker utterly transformed? We next discuss perversity. Why do we enjoy doing transgressive things? Who is likely to be perverted? Is perversion ever a good strategy?

Bonus: How would Paul rate Yoel on a scale of 1 to 5?

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

Links:

• Small Potato - by Paul Bloom - Small Potatoes
• Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction: A Meta‐Analytic Review - Twenge - 2003 - Journal of Marriage and Family - Wiley Online Library
• Long-term effects of pregnancy and childbirth on sleep satisfaction and duration of first-time and experienced mothers and fathers - PubMed
• In Defense of Parenthood - S. Katherine Nelson, Kostadin Kushlev, Tammy English, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2013
• In Defense of Parenthood
• What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting
• Idealizing Parenthood to Rationalize Parental Investments - Richard P. Eibach, Steven E. Mock, 2011
• The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions | The New Yorker
• St. Vincent - Smoking Section (Official Audio) - YouTube

Many academics care about diversity in faculty hiring, but why? Azim Shariff joins the show to talk about his new paper where he describes rationales for diversity in hiring, and an as-yet unpublished study where he asked department chairs how much they actually care about those rationales. We also talk about the empirical evidence for the diversity rationales (it's mixed!), Paul Bloom's argument against viewpoint diversity, and the future of DEI policies in the U.S.

Plus, Azim deviates from his long-standing practice of not drinking beer.

Special Guest: Azim Shariff.

Links:

• Taking faculty diversity seriously means asking why it matters
• Viewpoint diversity and its limits - by Paul Bloom
• CAMP: Centre for Applied Moral Psychology – University of British Columbia | Psychology | Director: Azim Shariff, PhD

Mickey and Yoel talk about Canada's controversial euthanasia law (called MAID: medical assistance in dying). Since its introduction in 2016, an increasing number of Canadians are choosing euthanasia (in recent years, more than 5% of deaths in Canada were the result of MAID). We talk about the history of the law, criticism of it in Canada and abroad, and our own discomfort (or lack of) with legal euthanasia.

Separately, we also discuss a new paper that claims to show robust ego depletion effects--but is it just showing fatigue by another name?

Links:

• Congratulations, You've Discovered Fatigue
• Revisiting Ego Depletion: Evidence from Multi-Lab Collaborations
• Canada Gave Citizens the Right to Die. Doctors Are Struggling to Meet Demand. - The Atlantic
• Sturgill Simpson - Make Art Not Friends (Official Video) - YouTube

Paul Litvak joins the show to talk about how AI tools can help us measure research quality and assess evidence in the scientific literature. His first project is a way to extract test statistics and p-values from papers automatically, with no manual coding needed. We also talk about Paul's non-profit dedicated to improving the reliability of scientific research, the legendary judgment and decision making scholar Robin Dawes (whose entirely algorithmic approach to graduate student selection once went terribly awry), and Paul's exit from academia. Plus, Yoel reveals a shameful secret about his use of AI.

Special Guest: Paul Litvak.

Links:

• What If Everyone Knew Which Science to Trust?
• https://evidence.guide/
• The Robyn Dawes Institute for the Improvement of Science
• Why are so many professors conservative? - by Paul Bloom
• Science is a strong-link problem - by Adam Mastroianni

Mickey is back and fired up about citation diversity statements. We talk about a recent editorial from Nature Reviews Psychology encouraging authors to include a "citation diversity statement" in their articles to "to draw attention to citation imbalances and confirm that they made efforts to cite publications from a diverse group of researchers." We discuss what we don't like about the editorial, as well as the strongest case for it.

We also talk about SpringerNature's profit margins, posting on LinkedIn, and Mickey's extremely problematic beer views.

Sponsored By:

• MindSampler: MindSampler provides a simple and powerful way to run Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) research directly from your Qualtrics account. Promo Code: 2P4B

Links:

• Mickey's post on LinkedIn
• Citation diversity statements | Nature Reviews Psychology
• The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists
• Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans | Nature Human Behaviour
• Nature Communications retracts much-criticized paper on mentorship – Retraction Watch
• Feel Free - YouTube

David Tannenbaum (Associate Professor of Management at the University of Utah) joins the show to talk about one of Yoel's favorite papers: a massive field study of honesty in 40 countries that had some unexpected results. We talk about the promises and pitfalls of field studies, what happens when your results are not at all as expected, and how to deal with going viral (in a bad way). Also, we talk about our recent hiking trip and David actually drinks two beers.

Special Guest: David Tannenbaum.

Sponsored By:

• MindSampler: MindSampler provides a simple and powerful way to run Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) research directly from your Qualtrics account. Promo Code: 2P4B

Links:

• Sunshine Coast Trail — Hut to Hut Hiking - Powell River BC
• Civic honesty around the globe | Science
• Data and code for: Civic Honesty Around the Globe - Replication Data for: Civic Honesty Around the Globe
• Great Lake Swimmers - Pulling On A Line [Official Music Video] - YouTube

This is a re-release of Episode 95, which was recorded in September 2023.

Paul Bloom joins Yoel and Alexa to talk about the glamour and humiliation of teaching psychology at the college level. They discuss how they've changed their approaches to teaching over the years, and whether they've become more skilled or more out of touch (or both). Alexa shares her experiences teaching about morality and evolution to a predominantly Christian student body, Yoel laments the fact that his students aren't more disagreeable, and Paul claims that critical thinking is overrated. In an era of increasing remote instruction, they claim that online courses can't do what they do. But, only Yik Yak knows for sure.

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

Links:

• Paul Bloom's Teaching Advice
• ClearerThinking.org Podcast | Career science, open science, and inspired science (with Alexa Tullett)
• Teacher (On FIlm) - YouTube

Paul Bloom takes over the show to interview Yoel about loss of faith: when to give up on a theory, and which of his own findings he no longer believes. But it's not all doom and gloom! They also talk about what social psychology findings they think are robust, and what new research they are excited about.

But before all that, they discuss whether Sydney Sweeney's new American Eagle ad campaign is pro-eugenics.

Special Guest: Paul Bloom.

Sponsored By:

• Statistical Horizons: Use the promo code for 20% off any seminar today! Promo Code: BEERS

Links:

• Yes, Sydney Sweeney's Boobs Are Anti-Woke
• Speak Now Regret Later | Michael Inzlicht | Substack
• Psychologists Have Been Wrong About Death For 40 Years
• The Reports of Terror Management Theory’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Yoel is joined by a mysterious pseudonymous duo called Slime Mold Time Mold, who are proposing a new paradigm for psychology based on principles from cybernetics. This means thinking of the behavior as the result of "governors" (think drives) that are trying to reduce the distance between a set point and the state of the world by motivating you to do stuff. So when you are thirsty, you are highly motivated to drink, and when you need to pee, you are highly motivated to find a toilet. Those are simple examples, but can we use the same principles to explain more complex phenomena like emotion, motivation, personality, mental illness, and more? That is what my guests on this episode are proposing.

Special Guest: Slime Mold Time Mold.

Sponsored By:

• Statistical Horizons: Use the promo code for 20% off any seminar today! Promo Code: BEERS

Links:

• Angel's Envy Bourbons - Kentucky Bourbons
• SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD – Mad Science Blogging
• The Mind in the Wheel
• Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - Wikipedia
• I Palindrome I - YouTube

Returning guest Spencer Greenberg joins the show to talk replications, what psychologist think of terror management theory (and other controversial topics), and a machine-learning tool he developed to predict correlations between psychological traits and survey questions.

In this episode, we talk about what Spencer has learned by replicating studies from recent publications in psychology, the decline of p-hacking, and what other threats to validity psychologists should be worried about.

Special Guest: Spencer Greenberg.

Sponsored By:

• Statistical Horizons: Use the promo code for 20% off any seminar today! Promo Code: BEERS

Links:

• Transparent Replications
• PersonalityMap | Explore 1 million human correlations spanning personality, demographics, behaviors, psychology, and beliefs
• AI can outperform humans in predicting correlations between personality items | Communications Psychology
• What do we know for sure about human psychology? (with Simine Vazire) | Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg — the podcast about ideas that matter
• Career science, open science, and inspired science (with Alexa Tullett) | Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg — the podcast about ideas that matter
• Broncho - "Get Gone" (Official Video) - YouTube

It's been a tumultuous time for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in higher education. Whether due to political pressure, internal arguments, or both, many prominent institutions are revamping their DEI offices (or even eliminating them altogether) and rethinking DEI policies that once seemed unquestionable. Amori Mikami from the University of British Columbia re-joins the show to talk about the changes and what she thinks universities ought to be doing (as well as what she thinks we can do better).

Along the way, Yoel and Amori talk about the use of race and gender in hiring, diversity statements, October 7 and the Gaza war, and institutional neutrality (in short, this episode touches every third rail imaginable). There's some debate and some agreement, but most importantly we both finish our beers.

Special Guest: Amori Mikami.

Links:

• Amori Mikami - UBC Department of Psychology — Associate Head, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
• The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer
• Los Macuanos - Pasado y Presente ft. Lucrecia Dalt (Official Music Video) - YouTube

Arguably, the last 25 years of moral psychology have been about people's judgments of "purity violations"--ostensibly harmless acts that "are disgusting or degrading to one’s spiritual nature." From sex with (dead) chickens to pet-eating to baby Jesus buttplugs, moral psychologists have been fascinated by purity transgressions. Moral psychologist and purity expert David Pizarro joins the show to talk about the concept of purity and recent critiques arguing that it's a concept too broad to be useful. Along the way, we also discuss how often to shower, getting into bed in your outside clothes, and ritualistically washing your dad's feet.

Special Guest: David Pizarro.

Links:

• How disgust affects social judgments - ScienceDirect
• The Problem of Purity in Moral Psychology - Kurt Gray, Nicholas DiMaggio, Chelsea Schein, Frank Kachanoff, 2023
• Two Psychologists Four Beers Episode 90: Freelance Kinkology (with Aella)
• Very Bad Wizards podcast

On-again off-again co-host Mickey Inzlicht joins the show to debrief about the recent SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) conference. We then dissect a new paper purporting to show working memory deficits in heavy cannabis users, including a deep dive into the preregistration. Finally, we discuss a recent Op-Ed in the Guardian that argues that research on AI empathy is fatally flawed.

Links:

• Brain Function Outcomes of Recent and Lifetime Cannabis Use | Child Development | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network
• OSF Registries | Verbal Memory and Language Processing in Young Adults who Use Cannabis: An Analysis of the Human Connectome Project
• AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged | MJ Crockett | The Guardian
• Tunde Adebimpe - Magnetic (Official Video) - YouTube

Cultural and developmental psychologist and open science advocate Moin Syed joins the show to talk what he thinks people get wrong about ideology, diversity, and open science. We talk about what role, if any, researchers' ideology should play in their science, and what it means when people describe psychological research as "ideological." In the second half of the show, we talk about what people get wrong about preregistration, and why it seems some misconceptions just won't die. We also talk about Moin's attempt to correct some misinformation (it did not go that well), and some local beer history.

Special Guest: Moin Syed.

Links:

• You Also Have an Ideology
• So Useful as a Good Theory? The Practicality Crisis in (Social) Psychological Theory - Elliot T. Berkman, Sylas M. Wilson, 2021
• Two Psychologists Four Beers Episode 100: What Happened at Perspectives on Psychological Science?
• Preregistration: More Promises than Pitfalls
• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race: Tatum, Beverly Daniel: 9780465060689: Amazon.com: Books
• A Brief Note on Intellectual Sloth; or, Are 70% of U.S. Faculty Really Adjuncts?
• Hinds - En Forma - YouTube