Episode 75: Beyond Experiments

Two Psychologists Four Beers

Alexa and Yoel talk about a paper purporting to show that winning the Nobel Prize increases your lifespan. In the process, they dip their toes into non-experimental causal inference and discuss whether there is a taboo in psychology about drawing causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Plus, Yoel does his best to explain what an instrumental variable is and Alexa drinks a very large beer.

Links:

• Two Psychologists Four Beers on Untappd
• The Taboo Against Explicit Causal Inference in Nonexperimental Psychology - Michael P. Grosz, Julia M. Rohrer, Felix Thoemmes, 2020
• Instrumental Variables in Sociology and the Social Sciences | Annual Review of Sociology
• Mortality and immortality: The Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity - ScienceDirect