The Science of Scare project, conducted by MoneySuperMarket.com, recorded heart rates in participants watching fifty different horror movies to determine the scariest of scary movies. Here is a brief Methods section for the study: They also describe how and why they created the "Scare Score" variable to answer concerns that overall heart rate scores favor movies with jump scares: Below is a screenshot of the original variables and data for 12 of the 50 movies provided by MoneySuperMarket.com: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ https://www.mon ..read more

I have shared AMPLE examples for teaching correlations. Because I've got you, boo. Like, I have shared days' worth of lecture material with you, my people. I am adding one more example. I have used this example in my positive psychology course for years, and it really illustrates what can happen en masse when marketing departments and less-savory pop-psych elements try to establish causal relationships with features (stereotypes?) of happy countries and individuals' subjective well-being. I like this one because it is math-free, UG-accessible, and not terribly long. Joe Pinsker, writing f ..read more

 I enjoy fun ways to refer to the fact that regressions can't be predicted forever. Like, trends have to stop, right? Here is a v. recent one ..read more

I love JAMA Visual Abstracts. I have blogged about them before. They are great ways to illustrate 1) basic, intro stats topics, 2) excellent sci-comm, and 3) psych-adjacent medical examples.  I learned about a recent JAMA publication on NPR (which you could play for your students). It compared blood pressure in people who were in a Tai Chi exercise condition versus an aerobic exercise condition: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2814872 Here are some ways you could use it in class: 1. Simple factorial ANOVA research design. Two groups with a repeated ..read more

This is a very brief example to spice up the measures of central tendency lecture. There is a game show in Germany, and one of the rounds of the game show is performing a perfect median split on food. OF COURSE, IT IS A BAVARIAN HOT PRETZEL. The "splitting championship" game is part of a larger video game. Here is the YouTube version and here is the Reddit version, with more deets on the game show. To be clear, we aren't talking about eye-balling here. The median split is an exact split by weight. Just as a statistical median split is an exact splitting of a data set. Here is a more exac ..read more

Hey, all- Here is today's (2.8.24) presentation about working more statistics into your social psychology course. I'm mostly posting this for the folks who went to the conference because I told them I would, but feel free to use this advice to add some novel stats examples to your social psychology classes ..read more

Hey!  I'm giving a keynote at the February annual teaching pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. It's all about social psychology stats example. Like this one! This one demonstrates social comparison theory without ever saying social comparison theory. YouGov published data (here is the full data source) that asked participants to rate their own, close-other, and far-others on several factors related to modern life (see below). In doing so, they unknowingly trigger social comparison theory, and in particular, downward social comparison. TL;D ..read more

OK. This wasn't my original idea, but I love it so much that I'm blogging about it. The original idea came from Dr. Andrea Sell, who, in turn, got this idea from one of her brilliant student, Johanna Perez.  How t-distributions are like Brazilian Butt Lifts: A treatise.  First, familiarize yourself with the Brazilian Butt Lift: The fat doesn't leave. As illustrated below, the fat just moves...into the tail.  https://ariamedtour.com/blogs/why-is-bbl-popular/ Is this not what William Gosset did when he created the t-curve? Instead of moving around fat, he moved around ..read more

I love internet-based teaching ideas. They are free and current. At least, they are current when I first post them, but some of my posts are ten years old.  SO, my old post about the Baby Name Voyage is no longer useful. It doesn't exist there anymore. Instead, please go to NameGrapher to show your students how flash-in-the-plan trendy baby names, like my own, have an unimodal distribution: As opposed to bimodal distributions, which flag a name as a more classical name that enjoyed a resurgence, like Emma: A good follow-up activity for this is asking your students to enter their ..read more

 Hey. Most of you have never met me and only read my words on this blog, so I thought it would be fun to share a recording of a talk I gave at Murray State University in October of this year.  Not only do you get to see/hear me in action, I think this talk does a great job of summing up my approach to statistics and what I want my students to get out of my class. If you agree with my approach, may I gently suggest that you sign yourself up to get updates on  my forthcoming WW Norton Psychological Statistics textbook: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/l/710463/2023-10-26/2tp3nt ..read more