Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck

Spirit of Bern 2026

Teaching

AI

Ich war beim Spirit of Bern (2026) eingeladen über KI in der universitären Lehre zu sprechen - tolle Veranstaltung, zahlreiches Publikum, auch wenn es hier noch nicht danach…

DiMiDo Adventkalender

Methods

Here it is our TueWenThu (German Versions: DiMiDo) Adventkalender - trouble remembering what a p-value is - we are here to help - on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays - all…

Scipod

Default Effect

Teaching

Podcast

‘Etwas zum Anfassen erzeugen’ - Runde 2 -> im Frühjahrsemester 2025 im Rahmen meiner Lehrveranstaltung ‘Wie entscheiden wir uns?’ an der Universität Bern gab es die 2. Runde…

Forget Ilias - Build your course page with Quarto

Methods

Ilias is the start and end of all sorrow. Unfortunatly (my uni)[www.unibe.ch] is locked in with Ilias - this post is not about this sad truth but a solution for all my…

Interview

Interview

Fabian Rütschi und Erin Gyger, zwei SchülerInnen aus Bern, haben mich unlängst für ein Interview, im Rahmen ihres Deutschkurses, angefragt. Wir haben uns dann getroffen und…

Replication: Money Priming

Replication

Priming

OSF / Pre-Regs (German)

Scipod

Default Effect

Teaching

Podcast

‘Etwas zum Anfassen erzeugen’ - das war eines der Ziele in meiner Lehrveranstaltung ‘Wie entscheiden wir uns?’ im Frühjahrssemester 2024 an der Universität Bern. Der Auftrag…

Replication: Red

Replication

Perception

Hagtvedt, H., & Brasel, S. A. (2017). Color saturation increases perceived product size. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(2), 396-413.

Seniorenuni

Teaching

Open Science

Replication

And for the last big external teaching in 2023 I turn to the Seniorenuni (senior university) at the University of Bern. This is a program where seniors can sign up for a…

Kinderuni

Teaching

Decision Making

Sometimes teaching turns out to be very different from the usual lecture on a Wednesday. I was asked (well I signed up) to teach in the Kinderuni (children’s university) at…

Replication: Default effect

Replication

Default Effect

Framing

Johnson, E. J., Bellman, S., & Lohse, G. L. (2002). Defaults, framing and privacy: Why opting in-opting out.

Replication: Kisses

Replication

Emotion

Decision Making

Rottenstreich, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2001). Money, kisses, and electric shocks: On the affective psychology of risk.

Replication: Numeracy and decision making

Replication

Framing

Numeracy

A series of four studies explored how the ability to comprehend and transform probability numbers relates to performance on judgment and decision tasks. On the surface, the…

Replication: In search of homo economicus

Replication

Decision Making

Emotion

Understanding the role of emotion in forming preferences is critical in helping firms choose effective marketing strategies and consumers make appropriate consumption…

Things to come in Quarto

Methods

So Quarto it is … after the 3rd time trying to update Wowchemy and Hugo and things breaking - time for something new … Quarto “Quarto® is an open-source scientific and…

Open Science Lecture Series

Open science

This will be fun - Lecture series on Open Science, Replication, Reproducibility, Open Data and many more.

What HoPTM looks like from the inside

Process tracing

R

As mentioned some days ago our Handbook of Process Tracing Methods is out in the wild …

Handbook of Process Tracing Methods

Process tracing

Decision Making

Eye tracking

Flashlight

Mousetracking

WOOP WOOP - here it is - the second edition of our beloved “Handbook of Process Tracing Methods”

Pictures

R

So, here we go - new blogdown site … thanks to Dan (https://twitter.com/dsquintana) to kicked me over the edge actually doing this …

BernR Meetup

Meetup

R

Statistics

Today (Dec 10th 2018) we will meet for the first BernR Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/Bern-R/) – hope to learn new things and get to know cool R people. More to follow soon …

A letter to the black goat

Open science

Replication

I wrote this letter to the black goat podcast … will update here if I hear back from them …

Blind Haste (aka im Blindflug)

Perception

Traffic psychology

Chance encounters sometimes lead to interesting and new projects. This is one of those cases … I got to know Emanuel de Bellis during my time at Nestle and we never stopped…

Professor priming - or not

Decision Making

Replication

This was my first contribution to a Registered Replication Report (RRR). Being one of 40 participating labs was an interesting exercise – it might seem straightforward to…

The root of the problem

Replication

One of the root causes of where we are (as a science) in psychology and many other disciplines in terms of reproducibility of key (and other) results could not be better…

A short history of process tracing

Decision Making

Finally out (already mentioned earlier this year) – now in it’s full glory @ Current Directions in Psychological Science.

LaTeX <- pdfTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX

LaTeX

Lifehacks

Science

I have been using LaTeX (with pdfTeX) for 20+ years now – to be honest I never bothered to understand the differences between the different TeX engines – here is an…

Growing up to be old

Decision Making

Process tracing

Some papers have somewhat weird starting points – this one had an awesome starting point – Lake Louise (Canada):

Something about reverse inference

Decision Making

Process tracing

R

Often, when we run process tracing studies (e.g., eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, thinking-aloud) we talk about cognitive processes (things we can’t observe) in a way that…

Eye-Tracking with N > 1

Eye tracking

Methods

Open Source

R

Statistics

This is one of the fastest papers I have ever written. It was a great collaboration with Tomás Lejarraga from the Universitat de les Illes Balears. Why was it great? Because…

Everything you believe in is wrong – or is it simply terrorism?

Replication

Science

The replication crisis has many interesting effects on how people (and scientists) think about Psychology (and, of course, other fields) … Here is a nice summary of effects…

Everything is fucked …

Ego depletion

Replication

Science

Teaching

This syllabus of an (obviously) awesome class has a ton of good reads:

Before R there was S

R

Statistics

Before there was R, there was S. R was modeled on a language developed at AT&T Bell Labs starting in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers (and, later, Alan Wilks) along…

The exams package

R

Teaching

I gave the R package exams a shot for my decision making lecture. Here is what it does:

Sublime autocompletion

LaTeX

They say about Sublime: “The text editor you will fall in love with”

Three weeks without email

Lifehacks

I spend a lot of time writing and answering email. Email is, according to timing, the third longest activity on my computer (although I am using three computers and can…

New Paper on pychodiagnosis and eye-tracking

Decision Making

Eye tracking

Methods

Cilia Witteman and Nanon Spaanjaars (my dutch connection) worked together on a piece on whether psychodiagnosticians improve over time (they don’t) in their ability to…

the way I am seen, by people who know (and like) me

Decision Making

about illusions

Decision Making

Andrew Gelman talked about a really old paper I did together with Anton Kühberger ages ago. It was actually the first paper / ‘real’ scientific project I was involved in.

Schnitz(e)ljagd

Food Choice

Find the Schnitz(e)l!

all that mutate() and summarise() beauty

R

Statistics

The friendly people from RStudio recently started a webinar series with talks on the following topics (among others):

Moving an idea into business

Decision Making

Flashlight

Open Source

Papers

Recently Ryan Murphy and myself realised that a startup here in Berlin features ideas of our 2011 Flashlight paper.

dplyr is growing up …

R

Die Zeit Wissen … schreibt über Essensentscheidungen

Decision Making

Food Choice

Mal was Längeres zu unseren Lieblingsthemen: Essen und Entscheidungsforschung … Enjoy!

When something old …

Decision Making

Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M., & Kühberger, A. (2014). Out of sight – out of mind? Information acquisition patterns in risky choice framing. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 45…

New paper on food choice and simple heuristics

Decision Making

Food Choice

We got a new paper out on how people (consumers) use simple rules to make food choices. This is work in collaboration with the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne.
Here is…

Limesurvey randomizing

Open Source

It is kind of an odd problem.
For the following pretty straight forward question: How do I randomise questions within a group in Limesurvey? It seems to be really hard to…

*apply in all its variations …

R

Here is an excellent stackoverflow post on how apply in all its variations can be used.
One of the followups points at plyr (from demi-R-god Hadley Wickham) which provides a…

R Style Guide

Google

R

Statistics

This is mainly a note to self:

Religion and # of babies …

Gapminder

Google

Open Source

Religion seems to have little influence on the # of babies per woman – who might have thought …
Here is another excellent talk of Hans Rösling on the topic.

On writing in social science

Decision Making

Malcom Gladwell (author of Blink and Tipping point) meets Dan Ariely (author of Predictively Irrational and Ig Nobel Prize Winner) to chat on what are good strategies in…

how decisions deplete and breaks help

Decision Making

Ego depletion

The New York Times published a nice overview of the work on decision making and ego depletion (often ego depletion is used as a synonym with resource depletion, which is…

Why anybody should learn/use R …

Methods

R

Statistics

I had a discussion the other day on the re-appearing topic why one should learn R …
I took the list below from the R-Bloggers which argues why grad students should learn R:

awesome visualization tool for R

Google

R

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/googleVis/ enables chart generation similar to the ones instroduced by Hans Roesling in his TED talk on poverty – extremly cool 🙂

resinstalling packages in R after update

R

This is old - by should still work :) - comment on how to do this in 2019 below …

Sustainable research

Open Source

A sister blog with interesting contributions on what open source software researcher can use to work sustainable …

Psychology as a reproducible Science

LaTeX

Methods

R

Is Psychology ready for reproducible research?

Blog-attack

Decision Making

Here is what Andrew Gelman writes about an interview Colin Camerer gave on Spousomonics … Looking forward to Camerer’s reply …

Where you end up, having a PhD

Science

The illustrated guide from Kindergarten to PhD …
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

two good things come together

LaTeX

Tech

https://docs.latexlab.org/docs
LaTeX and Google Docs together in one nice (free)application – this is a brilliant idea, which gives you the power of LaTeX combined with the…

R and the World Cup

R

Statistics

Across the street at the Revolution blog a nice example of using R with data from the cloud (see another post on this topic here) shows us the distribution of fouls during…

R goes cloud

Methods

R

Statistics

Tech

Jeroen Ooms did for R what Google did for editing documents online. He created several software packages that help running R with a nice frontend over the Internet.
I first…

LaTeX looks more scientific

LaTeX

There are long discussions on the benefits of LaTeX over Word, but this statement from a (not too serious) paper of Andrew Gelman (a Professor of Statistics and Political…

Accepting to fail (in the name of science)

Science

Very interesting article in WIRED on accepting failure and how ignoring it changes the way scientists make progress (or not).

How WEIRD subjects can be overcome … a comment on Henrich et al.

Decision Making

Methods

Science

Joe Henrich published a target article in BBS talking about how economics and psychology base their research on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and…

Lattice versus ggplot2

R

Statistics

I really liked Lattice for generating graphs in R until I saw what ggplot2 can do …
One of the big differences between the two is the theory on which ggplot2 is based upon.…

R flashmob

R

Statistics

From: The R Flashmob Project
Subject: R Flashmob #2

Flashlight paper draft

Papers

We submitted our Flashlight paper today. Find a draft at the address below:
Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Michael , Murphy, Ryan O. and Hutzler, Florian,Flashlight – an Online…

LaTeX tips

LaTeX

Tech

Two things are often bothering when one starts to work with LaTeX: in text referencing of literature and Umlaute (for our German speaking friends) ****

XAMPP activating mysql

Tech

Here is the problem: I want to have a server (Apache, MySQL) on my local machine (for the current purpose it was a Windows machine) to do some developing, testing or a demo.…

double, triple or even sextuple blind?

Science

There is an interesting discussion on how the scientific review process should be handled going on at orgtheory.net blog. The point is that the obvious shortcomings in the…

Inference and R

R

Statistics

Dan Goldstein posted a short overview of Inference which allows working with R code in Microsoft Office and Excel.

create colored title in R plot

R

Statistics

David Smith has a very nice code example in which he sets the color of title word in a plot to the actual grouping color. Code can be found here. This seems extremely useful…

Priority Heuristic comment

Heuristics

We Johnson, Schulte-Mecklenbeck, & Willemsen, 2008 have got a new paper out that comments on the Priority Heuristic as described in Brandstaetter, Gigerenzer and Hertwig…