The InMind Blog

In this blog post, I will report on the experiences of social psychologists, such as myself, with committing ourselves to detailed descriptions of the hypotheses and other specifics of experiments before we run them. In part 1, I briefly cover some basics about this so-called pre-registration and then I will discuss my own experience with a pre-registration in the online journal Frontiers about unconscious deception detection. more

Despite the resurgence of interest in free will, there remains confusion and disagreement regarding free will’s role in social life, in particular, how people understand free will and whether free will guides blame and praise for others. In this blog post I argue that we need to pay closer attention to the folk concept of free will in order to resolve the confusion surrounding free will in everyday life. more

In this blog post, I will discuss the methodologies available for identifying genetic influences on psychological traits, why it has proved so difficult to reliably identify specific genes, despite 20 years of effort, and what this tells us about the nature of these genetic influences. more

In this blog post, I review a number of studies that suggest that telling women to focus on their MRS degree (aka getting married) while in college can make women less interested in earning a STEM degree (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math). Why does this matter? Because the STEM fields are in desperate need of women. Luckily, research also suggests that women in STEM are more desirable than women may realize. more

Bullying is a pervasive issue in schools today. This is one of two blog posts that will look at school aggression from the perspective of contemporary social psychology. In this post, I'll examine the role of groups in encouraging bullying. In my next post, I'll look at the perspective of the bullied victims. When it comes to bullying, it seems that groups can both be a part of the problem and the solution. more

Where do all the studies come from? Behind every headline trumpeting a new finding in psychology, you can usually find an article in a peer-reviewed psychology journal. But how reliable are these findings? This is what many scientists have recently started to wonder. Because of this, journals in psychology are starting to insist on better reporting of research studies. In this first post of a two-part series, I will explain some of the standards that have typically been used to judge whether a study deserves publication or not. more