Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at n.ycptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me is today's guest, Professor Yuri Simonson.

Yuri is an associate professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania,

and he blogs at Datacolada, which is a favorite blog among my data nerd friends and my social

science friends.

Uri's research, I like to think of it as breaking down into two categories.

On one level, Yuri research is factors that influence human decision making, like, for example,

the weather.

So I think of that as the object level.

And then on the meta level, Yuri researches the scientific method and problems in the

scientific method that leads studies to be less reliable than we would ideally like, especially

in social science and, for example, psychology. So that's the part we're going to focus on in today's episode.

For example, Yuri has been called the fraud vigilante for his work uncovering and

explaining instances of fraud in social science.

So we'll discuss that, but we'll also put it in the broader context of issues with the scientific method and maybe touch on the current replication crisis, the crisis of faith that's affecting psychology and social science in general that's been discussed in the news in recent weeks.

So, Yuri, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for inviting me.

You know, one thing that you said last time we spoke was that there's a connection between those two levels that I termed the object and meta level of your research, in which on the object

level, you're investigating biases in human judgment and decision making

or factors that can unconsciously influence our judgment.

...