Posts appear in reverse chronological order.
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The double dividend of safety
A guest blog in which Gillian Pepper states the obvious….. Some time ago now, I was chatting with Daniel over lunch. I told him that Richard Brown and I were continuing to find evidence in support of a theoretical model that Daniel published over a decade ago. Daniel surprised me with his response. He declared…
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Your study should not be like a mansion
Lately, I’ve been coming across a lot of proposed study designs that were like mansions. There I was, appreciating the well proportioned main research questions and the generosity of the outcome measures, when a little door got opened up in the panelling, and it became evident there were whole wings beyond the part where I…
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The Changing Cost of Living study, part two: The dynamics of poverty, anxiety and depression
Readers may be aware of the Changing Cost of Living study, which we carried out in this team from Autumn 2022 to Autumn 2023. I wrote an earlier post here explaining what the study was and why we did it. The study is now complete and the first paper is available here as a…
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Universal Basic Income already is a targeted system
A common response to our work on Universal Basic Income as an anti-poverty policy is the following: ‘Well, that’s going to cost a lot of money. Rather than giving money to everyone, including lots of people who don’t need it, it would be better to target all that money on the poorest people, who really…
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It probably is that bad
The discipline of psychology is wringing its hands about its failure to make enough substantial and dependable scientific progress over the last fifty years of effort. First, we blamed our methods: hypothesizing after the results were known, researcher degrees of freedom, p-hacking and the rest. Then, we went after the theories: theories in psychology were…
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Phoebe and the paradox of tragedy
All summer long, our little cat Phoebe spent much of her time squeezed onto the kitchen window bar, gazing out into the garden. How sweet, I thought, she is looking out on the sunshine and flowers. Coming home and encountering her yet again in position, we would say ‘she must really like sitting there’. Weeks…
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Does greater inequality cause worse health? No! And: kind of yes!
The question of whether greater economic inequality makes people’s health and wellbeing worse is an important one. The literature has been moving fast over recent years, and the debate has moved on somewhat since my previous essay. It can all get a bit technical and econometric at times. The questions most people care about are:…
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What do people want from a welfare system?
All industrialised societies feature some kind of welfare system: institutions of the state that transfer material resources to certain categories of people or people who find themselves in certain kinds of situation. Non-industrialised societies have systems of social transfers too, albeit sometimes more informal and not organised by the state. People seem to think this…
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How can I explain this to you?
One of the big problems of the social and human sciences is the number of different kinds of explanations there are for what people do. We invoke a great range of things when we talk about why people do what they do: rational choice, conscious or unconscious motivations, meanings, norms, culture, values, social roles, social…
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Treating causes, not symptoms
Yesterday saw the launch of our report ‘Treating causes not symptoms: Basic Income as a public health measure’. The report presents the highlights of a recently-ended research project funded by the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research. This has been an interdisciplinary endeavour, involving policy and political science folk, health economists, behavioural scientists,…
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On poverty and addiction
Reading descriptions of the lives of people living in adverse economic conditions, something that will strike you over and over again is how often addiction comes up: to alcohol, to tobacco, to other drugs, or to behaviours such as gambling. There is addiction in all strata of society, but, from the novels of Zola to…
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Innateness is for animals
Innate or acquired? Genes or culture? Nature or nurture? Biological or psychological? People are inveterately fond of trying to divide human capacities into two sorts. Commentators often seem to think that determining which capacity goes in which box is the main preoccupation of the evolutionary human sciences. (And because there is ‘evolutionary’ in the name,…
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Diamond open access journals in psychology and adjacent areas
Here is a list of diamond open access journals that may be of interest if you are publishing in psychology and adjacent fields. Diamond open access journals provide academic publishing services for free both to the reader (no paywall), and the author (no article processing fee). By switching to diamond open access journals, researchers could…
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The political economy of scientific publishing, and the promise of diamond open access
The claim that scientific publishing is broken is not even surprising any more. There are a number of different problems. Some of these are epistemic: a large number of bad or totally meaningless articles is published every year, diluting the credibility of science; undue weight is given to sexy claims in a small number of…
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Bayes Factor blues, and an unfashionable defence of p-values
Like many researchers, I have been trying to up my inferential game recently. This has involved, for many projects, abandoning the frequentist Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) framework, with its familiar p-values, in favour of information-thereotic model selection, and, more recently, Bayesian inference. Until last year, I had been holding out with NHST and p-values…
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The paradoxes of relational mobility
In some societies, people perceive that others can desert their existing social relationships fairly easy, in favour of alternative partners. In other societies, people feel their social relationships are more permanent fixtures, never able to be abandoned. Let’s call these high-relational-mobility societies and low-relational-mobility societies respectively. It seems intuitive that people’s trust of one another…
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The Changing Cost of Living Study: part one, cross-sectional results
People with lower incomes have worse mental health: more depression, more anxiety. On the face of it, this seems to be a strong pragmatic and ethical case for income redistribution: if we raised the incomes of the poorest in society, we could avoid all the health and social costs of those difficulties, and, more importantly,…
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How should we reduce the wellbeing costs of poverty?
Unless you have been in hiding for the past forty years, you will know that even in countries that are rich in aggregate, poverty is really bad for wellbeing – bad for physical health, bad for mental health, and bad for satisfaction with life in general. Definitions of poverty for developed nations generally include some…
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Breaking cover on the watching eyes effect
I have seldom had much to say on the watching eyes effect. Even though it is the most cited research I have ever been involved in, it was always a side project for me, and also for Melissa Bateson, and so neither of us has been very active in the debate that goes on around…
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Live fast and die young (maybe)
Quite a few big ideas have made it across from evolutionary theory into the human sciences in the last few years. I can’t think of any that has been more culturally successful than the ‘live fast, die young principle’. This principle, which was originally articulated by George C Williams in the late 1950s, says something…