Welcome to PsychEd on Substack!
In this first post I wanted to explain a little bit about what you can expect from this page, and the associated newsletter. This will be a space for discussing psychological research, doing better science, and the changing state of higher education.
Who Edits PsychED?
My name is Craig Harper, and I am a senior lecturer in psychology in the UK. My background is in social psychological research, specifically as it relates to social attitudes about crime and sexuality. More recently, however, I have become interested in political thinking, asking:
How do our psychological predispositions affect our political attitudes and behavioral expressions?
How do our political leanings affect the types of research questions that we study?
What do the types of research questions that we ask say about the nature of our discipline, and how the public views it?
These are some broad themes that the site will touch on, along with musings about how higher education is moving, how to do better research, and reviews of recently published psychological studies.
Why is PsychED Important?
Psychology is in the midst of an openness revolution. As a field we’re been dogged by a lack of replicability of key (or, at least, seminal) research findings, which has led many psychological scientists to ‘open up’ their work. This means:
Opening up plans for research (known as pre-registration)
Collaborating with large groups of people (known as consortium-based research)
Making study stimuli available (known as open materials)
Allowing access to research data (known as open data)
Posting work freely available to download, even in early form (known as posting pre-prints)
However, most psychological research is still placed behind journal paywalls, or is described poorly in the mainstream press. When papers are made available, they are not accessible to non-academics due to the ‘in-the-know’ nature of the websites used to post them to.
Here on PsychEd, I will post short and accessible overviews of new psychological research while also linking to freely available versions of the work being discussed. I will be trying to place findings into some societal context, highlighting what they mean for people who are perhaps less interested in the intricacies of the scientific process and more in the translation and application of new social scientific data.
Alongside this, I will be addressing ongoing debates in higher education, and hopefully offering an ‘on the ground’ view on some of the media-led discussions about what is happening on university campuses.
What Will You Get by Subscribing?
My plan is to publish regularly on PsychEd — probably three or four times per week once the site is properly established. Posts will include:
Research overviews (multiple posts per week)
Academic tutorials (occasionally)
Updates and comments on the state of higher education (weekly)
Substack’s business model relies on the use of email newsletter distribution. However, I’m acutely aware that nobody wants to have their inbox bombarded with multiple updates per week. For this reason, subscribers will receive email updates for:
All academic tutorial and higher education commentary posts
A weekly ‘digest’ post that will signpost and link to all of the research overviews
I am hopeful that this will keep emails to a minimum, and lead to subscribers receiving no more than two or three per week, always with a couple of days between them.
In time, it may be that a podcast-style format could be incorporated into the site. There is not currently a formal plan for doing this, nor is there a timeline — stay tuned for updates.