Accomplished Social Psychologist Shamed at His High School Reunion

Dr. John Bozman, the youngest professor ever tenured at the London School of Economics, recently attended his high school reunion.

“It was an absolute nightmare,” declared Dr. Bozman. “I got bullied a lot in high school, but this was some Carrie level shit. I almost wish they had dumped pig’s blood on me instead of making methodological critiques of my work. Young adults can be so cruel.”

Dr. Bozman was under the impression that his former classmates would be impressed by the 13 research papers he had published in the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology. Unfortunately for Dr. Bozman, when he told Montagne High’s class of 2009 about his academic endeavours, he was berated with insults.

“Barrie Goldbloom spat in my shrimp cocktail and told me I ought to be ashamed of myself for drawing conclusions from such weak correlations. Then Diana Carrington started laying into me about my small sample sizes. Then the others started gathering around my table and laughing. It felt like high school all over again.”

Dr. Bozman thought that would be the last of the abuse, but when he left the reunion dinner he was ambushed in the parking lot by three of his past peers.

“They grabbed me and slammed me against the hood of my car,” said Dr. Bozman, wincing as he recalled the traumatic event. “Two of them restrained me, and I really thought the third was going to punch me in the stomach or something. But instead, he just started lecturing me on P-hacking. I’m pretty sure Sally Greenwald saw too, which is totally embarrassing.”

NOTES: Social psychology has received considerable criticism over the past few years due to the replication crisis, which you can read about in our other story (link below). P-hacking is when you try out a bunch of different statistical analyses and then choose the one that gets you the best result, an issue that has plagued social psychology.

https://simplosion.com/replication-crisis-fails-to-replicate/