Believe me, most of us have felt the exact same way you might feel right now. You are in the beginning of your psychology studies and eager to learn everything there is about psychology, just like I was. I was passionate about the way individuals, inhabiting planet earth, think and behave and I was keen to explore the phenomena they bring with them. This is the reason why I chose to study psychology. Eager to plunge into the world of psychology with all its amazing, mind-blowing findings, I began my studies. As a naïve first semesters I, eventually, discovered something odd in the curriculum. In black and white font there it was written: statistics I. Excuse me? Cold sweat ran down my back. Did I miss something? Did I accidentally enrol to another study plan? No, I was enrolled in psychology all right. I remembered the few things I knew about psychology. Classical conditioning, rats, reinforcement, Freud, Oedipus complex and some other things. Where would numbers and figures fit in? I couldn’t believe it and gradually, I began to doubt my choice. I would have thoughts like: Is psychology really the right thing? Should I better choose a subject that won’t incorporate any statistics, or maths in general? Maybe I should just switch it from my major to my minor? But let me tell you something, some of us have followed those suggestions made by our lazy, biased minds, but most of us haven’t. I’m glad I haven’t because now I can reap the rewards. Sure, it was not all fun and games learning the formulas and the lingo, but once I did I found myself understanding much, much more. Reading through a research paper now is very different than when I started my studies. I actually understand what they are trying to say in their results and discussion parts. Statistics is not as amazing and mind blowing as other subjects of psychology, such as neuropsychology or social psychology, but it is a vital tool to not only understand, but also work professionally and successfully within the field of psychology. So, what does statistics give you? A headache, countless hours of procrastination and definitely a deepened understanding of psychology. Without statistics it would be very hard determining whether a finding is important, significant, or whether a person is below or above average. It is necessary. All those mind-blowing findings in psychology wouldn’t be mind-blowing at all because without statistics you couldn’t see where the significance lies. 

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ROCK YOUR LIFE! is a mentoring program that supports adolescents in the 8th and 9th school year on their way to apprenticeship and training. During the course of 1.5 years, participants are accompanied and guided by students or young employees in a 1:1 close mentoring relationship. The aim is to help the adolescents in their transitioning phase from school into training places on offer, that resonate with their interests and strengths. The mentoring will help the teenagers with practical concerns like preparation of formal applications and the search for the right apprentice position, and moreover offers opportunity and room to explore their own potentials and goals. The ROCK YOUR LIFE! mentoring is complemented by a swiss-wide network of companies, through which these partner companies enable first insights into working environments. Since 2013, already over 550 mentoring pairs could be brought together at eight locations in Switzerland. ROCK YOUR LIFE! has a vision of a society, in which social mobility, educational justice and equality of opportunities is reality for everyone. Studies show that young adults, who are voluntarily committed and involved, gain confidence, develop self-initiative and expand their cooperation skills. Students and young employees, who successfully worked as mentors at ROCK YOUR LIFE!, strengthen and improve their self- and social competences, are being conscientised for their liabilities towards society and also the dual educational path, and can make practical use of their mentoring experiences in the later profession as well as in their own applications as an additionally acquired (coaching) expertise. Learn more about the scopes and possibilities to involve oneself on schweiz.rockyourlife.org.

Author: Jonas Töngi

The good, the bad and the bigly  

It’s been almost 8 years since the replication crisis has plunged psychology into a serious scientific crisis. Ironically, by now, one of the most replicable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully replicated. While some find themselves either in despair or in denial about this circumstance, I would argue that this is rather a huge opportunity to rethink, renew and complement our methodology. We’re so used to applying alleged gold-standard testing paradigms that originate from the 40-60ies that we’ve gone somewhat blind to the new and amazing construction kit that IT and the virtual world are offering us for conducting observations on a completely new scale.

The internet has connected the world and allows us to go way beyond the confinements of small-scale brick and mortar lab-based psychology experiments. Taken together, it constitutes a package that allows us to put psychological research on a completely new footing. It might provide the evidence we currently still owe, if we only examine WEIRD people in small groups. Now, we can not only conduct field research globally with hundreds of thousands of study participants simultaneously, we can also continuously interact with them; all we have to do is to be bold enough to use the new opportunities and work closely together with different professional groups to make this happen.

Yet, two requirements are central for such a web-based world-wide research endeavour to be truly successful:

1. The whole setup needs to focus on the user experience and benefit of the study subjects. This may well be in the form of “infotainment”, as the typical monetary compensation for tediously boring experimental setups is simply out of question for ultra-large global cohorts.

2. Collecting psychological and thus highly sensitive data on a global scale needs a failsafe forward-looking data protection policy and guaranteed anonymity.

The first point can be addressed by using psychological instruments in the guise of entertaining computer games, as well as to provide individually tailored and understandable feedback to everyone taking part. In addition, the interesting research results drawn from such a project should also be made directly accessible to the general public.

The second point concerns citizen empowerment; provinding them interesting insights about how individuals' minds work. However, it requires an additional independent institution to guarantee data privacy: indeed, the personally identifying data should always be strictly separated from the completely anonymized “content data”. Basically, it's the complete opposite of Facebook and the likes: it must not be possible to turn your data into a business model without your clear consent or without giving you the lion’s share of the earnings.

Advancience is a startup that is based on the COSMOS research project from the University of Basel. We have learned that our research goals require scaling-up psychological studies and that it is easier to achieve if we go down the entrepreneurial road. The Healthbank Cooperative is our strategic partner, which ensures that the data generators themselves own the data and are always in charge of how their data is being used.

Together we’re building a research basis for publicly funded scientists. Get ready to think big: What would you investigate, if you had a cohort of more than 100 k individuals?

Author: Dr. Christian Vogler