Psychologist, author, & horror entertainment producer // New book: Morbidly Curious, out now.
Eureka Springs, AR
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Morbidly Curious releases tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who supported this project, from blurbers and early readers to followers who pre-ordered the book.
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
I was having this same conversation yesterday about how AI will disrupt psychological research:
If I had bet, I'd wager that:
- short opinion/review pieces are going to become very hard to publish (or those journals will be spammed with AI slop)
- collecting interesting, real-world data or field experiments will be increasingly valuable and distinctive
- archival analyses will become popular, but potentially face a glut of submission
- social networking (and social skills) will be increasingly valuable
- grad admissions and job interviews will increasingly sample skills that can't be faked using AI (e.g., chalk talks)
- journals/conferences will face a peer review collapse due to increasing submission
- AI will quickly be integrated into peer-review to prescan every paper for errors, omissions, etc
- faculty will get exhausted from being spammed by AI agents and slop and will disengage from email with strangers
With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here's what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally:
✅The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.)
✅ Field experiments will rise in value and generally making "connections" with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand
✅ Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it
✅Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts.
✅Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage.
⚠️Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this "bread and butter" research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for "peer-reviewed" research.
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
We also built a website where you can browse these ingredients, annotate the stories you love and see what they are made of, psychologically. Website: motivational-ingredients.com
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
Our paper 'Carving Stories at Their Natural Joints' is out in Psychological Review (@APA_Journals).
It means a lot to me, especially because I got to collaborate with many researchers from different disciplines whose work I truly admire.
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I feel like I am missing something - what exactly are the use cases for Muse? Seems like a fun little gimmick to me, but not much else
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
How much do you know about the horror genre?
Here's a short thread of really fun infographics about horror movies, many of which I found on @DataIsBeautiful. We've got everything from demographics to jump scares to Bechdel Test scores.
A few of these may surprise you!
1/💀
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
Using AI helps people achieve higher grades and get their work done much faster, but they learn less and suffer on actual exams.
I have seen this in my own large Intro Psych class:
-the class average for open book exams is almost always 85%
-after AI, the average shot up to 95% (because it was easy to use AI)
-after I made the final cumulative exam in person (without AI) it went down to 68%
It perfectly mirrors the results of this new research and poses a serious problem for education and work performance. We are going to see inflated performance even as people learn less:
economist.com/graphic-detail…
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
It's interesting what does (or doesn't) catch the attention of media, politicians, or researchers.
A fascinating observation from the book I've been reading on morbid curiosity by @MorbidPsych:
"Although millions of dollars were spent investigating whether violent video games make kids aggressive, very little research was conducted looking at why violent video games were so appealing in the first place."
It's something I've thought long and hard about (albeit less formally than Dr. Scrivner) because I tend to bury the needle when it comes to morbid curiosity. In fact, when I took his morbid curiosity inventory, I scored pretty much off the charts in every category.
For me, I think there's something comforting in reading about or studying the violent, the grotesque, and the bizarre, because it reminds us to show gratitude for the peaceful and the mundane.
🕯️
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you never forget your early believers because early belief is expensive af.
there’s reputational risk, financial risk, social risk, etc. there’s roughly no proof, no consensus, & no obvious upside. the early believers have to see something way before the market has agreed it should exist.
whereas late belief is absolutely free. this is where you see pure bandwagon & trend following stuff. this rule applies to business sure, but maybe even way more to personal stuff.
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Ditto, too, for those of us not especially into conventional horror genre, but more into the horribly veristic travails of, say, Haneke (Funny Games) and Noe (Irreversible).
If you’re a #horror film/ #truecrime fan, do yourself a favor and read this incredible book by @MorbidPsych 👏🏼 I have never felt more seen. He debunks myths & stigmas surrounding the genre with empirical evidence. Novel, interesting, engaging, and easy to understand. 10/10 ❤️🔥
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
If you’re a #horror film/ #truecrime fan, do yourself a favor and read this incredible book by @MorbidPsych 👏🏼 I have never felt more seen. He debunks myths & stigmas surrounding the genre with empirical evidence. Novel, interesting, engaging, and easy to understand. 10/10 ❤️🔥
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
There may be a hidden benefit to your love of horror films. Researcher Coltan Scrivner found that horror fans handled COVID lockdowns with less psychological distress. Scary movies might double as rehearsal for real fear. What scares you on screen? It might be preparing you for something real.
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
There are now more than 600 million podcast listeners worldwide.
And one genre consistently ranks among the most popular: true crime.
Why are humans so captivated by stories of murder, deception, disasters and danger?
Next week on Sonia & Simon, we speak with @MorbidPsych , one of the world's leading experts on morbid curiosity.
The psychology behind our darkest fascinations is far more revealing than you might think.
Episode drops Monday.
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Anyone have access to this advance article?
Morbid Curiosity as a Multidimensional Construct
econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs…
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Not sure if it's AI or getting older or both, but every single social media platform has gotten significantly worse in the past year or two.
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
On the topic of the value of video gaming...
Has the rise of adult gamers created a new father–child bonding domain?
Gaming isn’t typically seen as attractive in men, but does that change if it facilitates childcare and bonding?
I loved playing sport with my dad, but there was always an athleticism/age gap. Gaming removes that. It keeps the coalitional, team-based psychology of sport, while potentially neutralizing the strength/age asymmetries.
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Both societies exist simultaneously. really incredible to think about
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Creating a successful horror TV show is difficult. But there is a way to make it work if you understand the psychology of fear.
Here's how:
morbidlycuriousthoughts.com/…
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
My theory sheds light on what embarrassment is for, what "cringe" means, why laughter can be creepy, why it's contagious, what comic timing is, and what it means to be a "serious person." This is a working paper and any feedback would be much appreciated. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/fp…
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
Humor is an evolutionary mystery. We don't know what humor is, why we evolved an apparatus to sense it, and why we emit strange panting sounds in response to it. I am thrilled to announce my new preprint (link below), which offers a solution to the mystery.
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Coltan Scrivner retweeted
Feels intuitively true to everyone but isn’t backed up by evidence.
Prosperity drives fertility rates *down*.
They still don’t get it.
It’s not just the expense. It’s the disbelief that your kid will have a good life. It’s the threats against women’s rights. It’s the lack of equality in relationships STILL. It’s the inability to find a quality partner. It’s the maternal mortality rates. It’s climate concerns. It’s war concerns. Its rule of law concerns.
And that 100% does trace back to political decisions being made in DC by both parties.
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