My favourite neuroscience/psychology blog Mind Hacks ran a wonderful quote by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert (whose TED talk I linked to earlier). The quote echoes one of the themes of my Ph.D. thesis (trying to account for the effects of emotions on decision making) and illustrates what has always drawn me to social psychology: Its balanced all-around view incorporating cognition, emotion, neurobiology and social influences.

So here goes:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

Amen, brother! Via Mind Hacks.

Last week, I mentioned an idea that Michael, Felix and I had discussed a while ago: The Journal of Failed Studies. We felt that this journal was to have a bright and shining future… if we ever got around to launching it.

Then Prof. Duchier kindly pointed me to The Journal of Interesting Negative Results, which in turn linked to The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. Especially the latter contains a number of fascinating articles on my favourite research subjects: Mood and subliminal influences on decision-making… all refusing to show a significant effect, unfortunately.

And so it appears that The Journal of Failed Studies already exists in several academic disciplines. Admittedly, they all found nicer ways of saying “fail”, too. To paraphrase Thomas Alva Edison: “My study hasn’t failed. I have just found 1000 ways of supporting the null hypothesis!”

I’m currently packing my bags for a trip to Weimar. I’ll fly out of London Stansted to Leipzig-Altenburg in the morning, but since Weimar isn’t close to any major airports, I’ll only be arriving in the early afternoon.

The occasion for my visit is the last seminar I’ll be teaching at the Bauhaus-University, at least for now. It’s also been the longest-running and most exciting one I’ve had the joy of being involved in: For almost one and a half years, a group of students has had the chance to contribute their work to the feature film project Heart of Fire under the supervision of its Oscar-winning producer Andreas Bareiss, Prof. Hennig-Thurau and myself.

Heart of Fire, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale film festival, is inspired by the true story of Senait Mehari, who was forced to become a child soldier during the Eritrean civil war and is now a pop singer in Germany. It was produced by Andreas Bareiss (producer of the Oscar-winning Nowhere in Africa), Sven Burgemeister (producer of the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl) and directed by Luigi Falorni (Oscar-nominated for The Story of the Weeping Camel).

Over the course of the project, which we termed Guru*Lab (as an extension of our Guru*Talk sessions), we got to work with all of these fine people - and pretty much everyone else who was involved in financing, producing, and distributing the movie. The students analyzed and commented on the screenplay, designed possible film posters, carried out marketing research, and organized and ran a test screening of the movie’s rough cut prior to the official Berlinale premiere. Perhaps most exciting of all: Three of the students were chosen to be part of the film crew and traveled along during the difficult three-month shoot in Kenya. Their task was to document everything and create the official Making-of.

So on Friday and Saturday, we’ll wrap up the seminar, review our work and project’s progress over the past 16 months. We’ll also attend the premiere of the Making-of which will be screened as part of the Bauhaus-University’s annual back.up film festival. It’s going to be a blast!

Dr. Felix Eggers‘ comment on my last post did remind me of something! In August 2006, Felix, Michael Paul and I were attending the AMA Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference in Chicago. All of us where in the middle of our Ph.D. theses back then, with Magdas, Shirleys and Bernies popping up left and right. Sitting at the Chicago waterfront, we wondered where we could ever publish all of our failed studies. The ingenious solution: We needed to start our own journal, aptly named The Journal of Failed Studies.

Come to think of it, it’s really not such a bad idea. Replication is one of the cornerstones of empirical research. If a study fails to replicate a previous result, or fails to confirm what theoretically should have worked, other researchers should know - assuming that your study didn’t simply fail because of sloppiness. Or maybe even then it would be useful to know which potential mistakes to look out for. However, as all researchers know, journal editors prefer to publish unusual or even counterintuitive results over failed studies (and who’d want to fault them for it) - resulting in the so-called “file drawer problem” or publication bias.

Maybe we’ll pull our Journal of Failed Studies idea out of the file drawer sometime. Here’s what Michael and Felix say about it:

“The Journal of Failed Studies?”

“Why not! Tee-hee!”

By chance, I stumbled across One Big Lab yesterday, a very interesting blog on Open Science maintained by (as far as I can tell) four Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. students. One of the many gems to be discovered there is a series of t-shirt designs called “Worst. Result. Ever.”:

You’ve been there, done that. Spent hours, days, weeks… months?… just to discover that your hypothesis (or “hope-othesis”) is completely wrong. Finished a data analysis only to see that what you’ve just produced can only be described as the Worst. Result. Ever. [...]

Each one is named after the hapless student who had the pleasure of seeing something very much like it in their own research.

I’ve had nightmares of the Magda, and once pulled a Bernie, too. Once the shirts become available, buying them will support the PSB workshop on Open Science in… what? Hawaii?! I need to go there!

I just visited the Scientific American to see whether they had picked up this Physicsworld story on an allegedly successful cold fusion experiment in Japan. It seems they didn’t, and so my premature hopes of seeing the world’s energy problems solved before I left the office today took a little dent.

Instead, SciAm’s front page featured a story on the therapeutic value of blogging:

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Therapeutic value notwithstanding, I’ll stop blogging for now and head over to the Freemasons Arms pub in Hampstead for dinner and a cold beer with Drs. Hennig-Thurau and Wiertz.

Phew. I spent a substantial part of the weekend editing transcribed guest lectures, and now I’m done for the night.

Let me explain: While I was at the Bauhaus-University of Weimar, I organized and co-hosted (together with Prof. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau) a series of invited talks on the art and economics of filmmaking. Not to be held back by such mundane things as modesty, we placed the whole series under the motto “The Film Industry in the 21st Century” and named it Guru*Talk (before we had invited even the first guest speaker), drawing on Merriam-Websters definition:

*gu-ru: A teacher and especially intellectual guide in matters of fundamental concern.

Because surely, if film wasn’t a matter of fundamental concern, what was?

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Hooray! The peer reviews are in: My paper “The Theory of Reasoned Action: Does It Lack Emotion?” (which is part of my Ph.D. dissertation) was accepted at the American Marketing Association’s 2008 Summer Marketing Educator’s Conference, which means I get to travel to San Diego in August to meet up with some of my friends in the academic community. The “Summer Ed” also brings forth fond memories…

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