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The problem with telling moms “It takes a village”

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased....

The use of psychological targeting—employing machine learning to predict consumer personality from digital footprints and subsequently tailoring persuasive messages—has emerged as a controversial yet...

From historial prayers to modern social media, the temptation is to cherry-pick evidence standards

Brent W. RobertsA.J. WrightLena RoemerCavan Bonner Recently Burn-Murdoch reported in the Financial Times (FT) that since 2014 conscientiousness was in a “free fall” in younger p…

Nature Human Behaviour - Correction for multiple comparisons should be ubiquitous

In a rapidly evolving Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) landscape, researchers, policymakers, and publishers have to continuously redefine responsible research practices. To ensure guidance o...

How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.

Sometimes, researchers worry about multicollinearity in situations where it’s actually a non-issue. Here’s one such scenario. Imagine a situation where you are interested in the effect of X on Y (X...