The Replication Crisis Christmas Quiz w/ Mickey Inzlicht & Dave Pizarro

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2025

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this festive descent into methodological despair, Chris and Matt convene a secret cabal of elite psychology podcasters within the Decoding Cloister, operating under the distant yet reassuring gaze of Arch-Wizard Paul Bloom, whose role is largely ceremonial but nonetheless morally binding.

Joining them are Dave Pizarro (Very Bad Wizards) and Michael Inzlicht (Two Psychologists Four Beers, emeritus), for what can only be described as an end-of-year audit of social psychology’s moral character.

What follows is a mixture of intense hubris, disciplinary self-loathing, and revolutionary insights, delivered via one of the most sadistic Christmas quizzes ever devised. The quiz format allows the episode to do what psychology does best: create the feeling of measurement while hovering dangerously close to intuition.

Alongside the quiz, we engage in some meta-commentary and sensemaking reflections on audience capture and the state of psychology-themed podcasts in 2025. In other words, it’s Christmas, so naturally everyone is discussing perverse incentives, damaged reputations, and the slow moral corrosion of institutions.

So join us, won’t you? For the first International Congress on Psychology-Themed Podcasting and Gurus…

Links

References

Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N., & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(4), 569–576.
Aarts, H., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2003). The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 18–28.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cognition, 2(2), 243–256.
Resnick, B. (2018, June 13). The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. Vox.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.
Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425.
Schimmack, U. (2018, January 20). My email correspondence with Daryl J. Bem about the data for his “Feeling the Future”. Replicability Index.
Merton, R. K. (1973). The normative structure of science. In The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations (pp. 267–278). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1942).
Hauser, M. (2012). Evilicious: Why we evolved a taste for being bad. Basic Books.
Kay, A. C., Wheeler, S. C., Bargh, J. A., & Ross, L. (2004). Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95(1), 83–96.
Macfarlane, B. (2024). The decay of Merton’s scientific norms and the new academic ethos. Oxford Review of Education, 50(4), 468–483.
Vaidis, D. C., Sleegers, W. W. A., van Leeuwen, F., et al. (2024). A multilab replication of the induced-compliance paradigm of cognitive dissonance. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 7(1).
Kelly, T. (2026). Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 62(1), e70043.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Hello and welcome to the coding the gurus.
0:30.2	A very special addition today.
0:34.3	Joining me, as usual, is the elder statement of the podcast, Matthew Brown, psychologist,
0:40.2	extraordinaire. Though this time, he's not the only legitimate. It's like, oh, and I'm Chris. Yeah,
0:46.6	I'm an anthropologist slash psychologist, right? But we don't, everybody knows that. The other thing is
0:53.4	lurking in the shadows, summoned a secret cabal of
0:58.7	superstar psychology podcasters has gathered in our little decoding cloister. I summoned them
1:05.6	today under the instructions of the Arch Wizard Paul Bloom. He conducts everything from afar. And we have
1:13.1	summoned the superstars of the psychology podcasting world to take stock of things. Now, the majority
1:19.1	could not attend because they had better things to do. So you might be like, well, what about all these
1:24.9	other people? But we have with us, Dave Pizarro from the very bad wizards.
1:31.0	And Mickey Inslicht, formerly, but still sort of honorary to psychologists for beers,
1:37.0	both psychologists, Dave Pizarro, moral psychologist and social psychologist.
1:43.1	And Mickey Inslich, social psychologist and experimental
1:46.5	psychologist. That's what I'm going to say. So thank you both for coming. Thank you for joining us.
1:52.9	Thank you for having us. I will say, much like the rest of my career, this, it's built on Paul Bloom saying no to things.
2:05.6	And then suggesting mine.
2:08.6	Just to be clear. I assume Paul would say no.
2:13.2	I like how you introduced us, though, as the superstars of the psychology podcasting world. I think this is it. I think we're in. I thought there are too many others. It's a small pond. It's a small pond, but, you know, yeah, the four of us are big fish. I mean, Scott Barry Kaufman stopped doing his. That's true. Well, that's why someone did you hear. The pie just got bigger for us.
2:36.0	It's a kind of crisis meeting.
2:38.0	What are we going to do?
2:39.0	Scott Barry's out of the game.
	...

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