Leif Nelson
speaker
57 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Leif Nelson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hurts a little bit, but I get it, because that's saying, hey, within the behavioral science community, we're the people that are watching the behavioral scientists. And you're right, no one likes internal affairs. Most of our thinking is that we want to be journalists, that it's fun to investigate. That's true for everybody in the field, right?
They're all curious about whatever it is they're studying. And so we're curious about this. And then when we find things that we think are interesting, we also want to talk about it, not just with each other, but with the outside world.
But I don't identify as much with being a police officer or even a detective, though every now and then people will compare us to something like Sherlock Holmes, and that feels more fun. But in truth, the reason I sort of wince at the question is that the vast majority of the time, it comes with far more burden than it does pleasure.
Yeah. The lawsuit makes all of the psychological burden into a concrete, observable thing. But the part prior to that is that every time we report on anything... That's going to be like, look, we think something bad happened here. Someone is going to be mad at us. And probably more people are going to be. And I don't want people to be mad at me. And I think about some of the people involved.
And it's hard because I know a lot of these people and I know their friends and I know the friends of the friends. And that carries real, real stress for, I think, all three of us.
Yeah, that's real bad. I'm not happy with being compared to the Stassi. The optimistic take is that there's less of that than there used to be.
When any of the three of us go and visit universities, for example, and we talk to doctoral students and we talk to assistant professors and we talk to associate professors, we talk to senior professors, the students basically all behave as though they don't understand why anyone would ever be against what we're saying.
They wouldn't understand the Stasi thing, but they also wouldn't even understand like why they almost are at the level, I don't understand why we're having you come for a talk. Doesn't everyone already believe this? But when I talk to people that are closer to retirement than they are to being a grad student, they're more like, you know, you're making waves where you don't need to.
You're pushing back against something that's not there. We've been doing this for decades. Why fix what isn't broken? That sort of thing.
I would say, but it is broken. And your evidence for that would be? The evidence for that is multifold.
Sometimes, for example, we'll get a submission where the research is really solid, but the conclusion is too strong. And I'll sometimes tell authors, hey, look, I'll publish your paper if you tone down the conclusion or even sometimes change the conclusion from saying there is evidence for my hypothesis to there's no evidence one way or the other, but it's still interesting data.
And authors are not always willing to do that, even if it means getting a publication in this journal. So I do think that's a sign that maybe it's a sign that they genuinely believe what they're saying, which is maybe to their credit. I don't know if that's good news or bad news. I think often when we're kind of overselling something, we probably believe what we're saying.
Editors largely in my field are uncompensated for their job, and reviewers are almost purely uncompensated for their job. And so they're all doing it for the love of the field. And those jobs are hard. I'm an occasional reviewer and an occasional editor. And every time I do it, it's basically taxing.
The first part of the job was reading a whole paper and deciding whether the topic was interesting, whether it was contextualized well enough that people would understand what it was about. Whether the study as designed was good at testing the hypothesis as articulated. And only after you get past all of those levels would you say, okay, and now do they have evidence in favor of the hypothesis?
There were a lot of societal phenomena that we really wanted explanations for, and then social psych offered these kind of easy explanations, or maybe not so easy, but these relatively simple explanations that people wanted to believe just to have an answer and an explanation.
She was at the center of everything. Being a prestigious faculty member at Harvard and all of her public speaking and her books. Her reputation was perfect. She was synonymous with the highest levels of research in organizational behavior. She's just a giant in the field.
My name is Leif Nelson, and I'm a professor of business administration at University of California, Berkeley.
We started our blog in late 2013. We decided we wanted to have a blog because we thought it would be fun to write things that were shorter than a journal article and that we did not have to wait two and a half years for the review process to play out. And so with that in mind, we just needed to name it and we wanted something that would be related to what we do. That's maybe the data part.
but would definitely not be sending signals of self-seriousness. So we tried out a few things, and somewhere in there, De De Colato was one that we obviously landed on. It had this nice entertaining feature that Yuri is Chilean. And so when he had suggested the name... He thought it rhymed, which still tickles me and Joe, because for him it's data colada.
The classic forms of what we'd characterized as p-hacking, they're not quite errors, they're decisions that are accidentally self-serving. It's if you measure multiple things but only report the one you like the most.
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