Dave Nussbaum

Author's details

Name: Dave Nussbaum
Date registered: March 20, 2012

Latest posts

  1. The Psychology of Nothing: Phantom Symptoms — May 8, 2013
  2. Paul Rozin on Music, Food, and Sex — May 3, 2013
  3. The Stapel Continuum — April 29, 2013
  4. Narrowing the Achievement Gap with a Psychological Intervention — April 17, 2013
  5. The Science of Gifts — December 20, 2012

Most commented posts

  1. Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reforming Social Psychology — 31 comments
  2. The Stapel Continuum — 26 comments
  3. Psychology is Science — 23 comments
  4. Simonsohn’s Fraud Detection Technique Revealed — 14 comments
  5. Luck vs Merit (Part 2) — 10 comments

Author's posts listings

May 08

The Psychology of Nothing: Phantom Symptoms

Categories:

featured, social psychology, The Psychology of Nothing

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George Heart Attack

Lovable anti-hero George Costanza is having a salad for lunch when he suddenly clutches at his chest and declares, “I think I’m having a heart attack!” His companions, Jerry and Elaine, seem remarkably unconcerned with George’s seemingly life-threatening predicament. As George breathlessly lists off the symptoms he’s experiencing (Tightness… Shortness of breath… Radiating waves of pain!), Jerry arrives at a less catastrophic diagnosis: “I know what this is. You saw that show on PBS last night, Coronary Country.”

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May 03

Paul Rozin on Music, Food, and Sex

Categories:

featured, social psychology

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paul rozin

I’m not sure how it’s possible that until yesterday I had never seen Paul Rozin speak. However it happened, I corrected a huge mistake by going to see him give an invited address at the Midwestern Psychological Association meeting in Chicago titled, The Aesthetics and Pleasures of Temporal Sequences. The talk spanned far more than that topic, but as Rozin’s research predicts, it was made extremely memorable by ending with a bang.

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4 comments

Apr 29

The Stapel Continuum

Categories:

featured, psychological science

by

Diederik Stapel

Along with many other psychologists, I’ve been closely following (and participating in) the ongoing discussion about finding ways to effectively improve the shortcomings in our field’s research methods. Given that the Stapel fraud case was an important spark to these discussions, I read Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s article, The Mind of a Con Man, in this week’s New York Times Magazine with great interest.

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26 comments

Apr 17

Narrowing the Achievement Gap with a Psychological Intervention

Categories:

featured, social psychology

by

schoolbus (small)

There is an academic achievement gap in the United States. Compared to their White peers, African American and Latino American students earn lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school. Recently, a small intervention, aimed at easing the psychological burdens that impair minority performance, has been found to interrupt this downward trajectory, improving the performance of minority students, narrowing the achievement gap, and with long lasting effects.

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Dec 20

The Science of Gifts

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featured, social psychology

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GiftGivingSpot1

Is it possible to get gifts down to a science? With gift giving season upon us, there has been a flood of advice for consumers on how to navigate their purchases scientifically. I even got in on the action myself, writing a piece for the Chicago Booth website on some new research by Yan Zhang and Nick Epley about when people appreciate a gift’s thoughtfulness. Reviewing the research – and the journalism – got me thinking about the strengths and the limitations of bringing a scientific approach to exchanging presents. There is a lot to be said for studying gift giving, as long as we remain mindful of its limitations.

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1 comment

Dec 11

It’s the Thought that Counts (sometimes)

Categories:

featured, social psychology

by

Gift-wraping

My first post for the Chicago Booth website has just gone up and I wanted to share the link — it’s called Using Behavioral Science To Pick The Perfect Holiday Gift. It’s on research by Yan Zhang and Nick Epley on when thoughtful gifts are appreciated. In writing the post I found several recent articles and guides on …

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Nov 28

Choosing Poorly

Categories:

featured, social psychology

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Anuj Shah

One of the obstacles that keeps the poor from rising out of poverty is the tendency to make costly financial decisions – like buying lottery tickets, taking out high interest loans, and failing to enroll in assistance programs – that only make their situation worse. In the past, these poor decisions have been attributed either to low income individuals’ personalities or issues in their environment, such as poor education or substandard living conditions. New research published this month in Science by Booth Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science Anuj Shah points to a new answer: living with scarcity changes people’s psychology.

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1 comment

Oct 25

Reform from the Bottom Up

Categories:

featured, psychological science

by

joesimmons

In recent months social psychologists have focused an increasing amount of attention on the soundness of their scientific methods. Although the problems we face are troubling, I believe that the renewed attention they are getting is a very positive trend because a self-critical approach is essential to ensuring the continuing health of the discipline. If, as a scientific community, we were to ignore problems as they became apparent, then our entire endeavor would be undermined. The question, then, is not whether we need to be improving the state of our science, but how we can do so most effectively.

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2 comments

Aug 10

The Psychology of Soda Bans

Categories:

featured, social psychology

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newyorkersoda

Will Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on large soda cups work? The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki gives us some compelling reasons to believe that it will, but there is also a case to be made that it could backfire.

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3 comments

Aug 06

Luck vs Merit (Part 2)

Categories:

featured, politics, social psychology

by

rolling_dice

Robert Frank discusses the role of skill vs. luck in producing success.

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10 comments

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