Scipod 2026

Teaching
Podcast
‘Etwas zum Anfassen erzeugen’ - Runde 3 -> Neues Jahr, neues Thema - in diesem Jahr haben wir Risikokommunikation behandelt. Wieder sind spannende Themen entstanden!
Apr 20, 2026
MSM

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…
Feb 27, 2026
MSM

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…
Dec 1, 2025
MSM

Scipod

Decision Making
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…
May 2, 2025
MSM

Quarto project setup

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…
Feb 22, 2025
MSM

Interview

Science
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…
Jun 15, 2024
MSM

Replication: Money Priming

Replication
Decision Making
OSF / Pre-Regs (German)
May 27, 2024
MSM

Scipod

Decision Making
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…
Apr 10, 2024
MSM

Replication: Red

Replication
Science
Hagtvedt, H., & Brasel, S. A. (2017). Color saturation increases perceived product size. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(2), 396-413.
Jan 7, 2024
MSM

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…
Dec 20, 2023
MSM

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…
Oct 28, 2023
MSM

Replication: Default effect

Replication
Decision Making
Johnson, E. J., Bellman, S., & Lohse, G. L. (2002). Defaults, framing and privacy: Why opting in-opting out.
May 20, 2023
MSM

Replication: Kisses

Replication
Decision Making
Rottenstreich, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2001). Money, kisses, and electric shocks: On the affective psychology of risk.
Jan 16, 2023
MSM

Replication: Numeracy and decision making

Replication
Decision Making
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…
Dec 16, 2022
MSM

Replication: In search of homo economicus

Replication
Decision Making
Understanding the role of emotion in forming preferences is critical in helping firms choose effective marketing strategies and consumers make appropriate consumption…
Oct 2, 2022
MSM

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…
Oct 1, 2022
MSM

Open Science Lecture Series

Open Science
This will be fun - Lecture series on Open Science, Replication, Reproducibility, Open Data and many more.
Jan 19, 2020
MSM

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 …
Jun 25, 2019
MSM

Handbook of Process Tracing Methods

Process Tracing
Decision Making
WOOP WOOP - here it is - the second edition of our beloved “Handbook of Process Tracing Methods”
Jun 20, 2019
MSM
 

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 …
Jun 20, 2019
MSM
 

BernR 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 …
Dec 10, 2018
Michael
 

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 …
Jul 31, 2018
Michael

Blind Haste (aka im Blindflug)

Science
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…
Jan 9, 2018
Michael

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…
Nov 13, 2017
Michael
 

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…
Nov 13, 2017
Michael
 

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.
Oct 31, 2017
Michael
 

LaTeX <- pdfTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX

Methods
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…
May 1, 2017
Michael

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):
Apr 12, 2017
Michael
 

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…
Apr 12, 2017
Michael
 

Eye-Tracking with N > 1

Process Tracing
Methods
Open Science
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…
Mar 13, 2017
Michael
 

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…
Sep 20, 2016
Michael
 

Everything is fucked …

Decision Making
Replication
Science
Teaching
This syllabus of an (obviously) awesome class has a ton of good reads:
Aug 12, 2016
Michael
 

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…
Jul 12, 2016
Michael
 

The exams package

R
Teaching
I gave the R package exams a shot for my decision making lecture. Here is what it does:
Jun 11, 2016
Michael
 

Sublime autocompletion

Methods
They say about Sublime: “The text editor you will fall in love with”
Jan 28, 2016
Michael
 

Three weeks without email

Methods
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…
Jan 10, 2016
Michael
 

New Paper on pychodiagnosis and eye-tracking

Decision Making
Process Tracing
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…
Nov 10, 2015
Michael
 

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

Decision Making
Jul 13, 2015
Michael
 

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.
Mar 11, 2015
Michael
 

Schnitz(e)ljagd

Decision Making
Find the Schnitz(e)l!
Feb 20, 2015
Michael
 

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):
Feb 12, 2015
Michael
 

Moving an idea into business

Decision Making
Process Tracing
Open Science
Recently Ryan Murphy and myself realised that a startup here in Berlin features ideas of our 2011 Flashlight paper.
Feb 7, 2015
Michael
 

dplyr is growing up …

R
 
Sep 25, 2014
Michael
 

Die Zeit Wissen … schreibt über Essensentscheidungen

Decision Making
Mal was Längeres zu unseren Lieblingsthemen: Essen und Entscheidungsforschung … Enjoy!
Aug 22, 2014
Michael
 

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…
May 7, 2014
Michael
 

New paper on food choice and simple heuristics

Decision Making
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…
Aug 16, 2013
Michael
 

Limesurvey randomizing

Methods
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…
Jun 3, 2013
Michael
 

*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…
Oct 13, 2012
Michael
 

R Style Guide

Methods
R
Statistics
This is mainly a note to self:
Sep 22, 2012
Michael
 

Religion and # of babies …

Methods
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.
May 24, 2012
Michael
 

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…
Feb 3, 2012
Michael
 

how decisions deplete and breaks help

Decision Making
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…
Aug 19, 2011
Michael
 

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:
Aug 2, 2011
Michael
 

awesome visualization tool for R

Methods
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 🙂
Jul 15, 2011
Michael
 

resinstalling packages in R after update

R
This is old - by should still work :) - comment on how to do this in 2019 below …
Apr 15, 2011
Michael
 

Sustainable research

Open Science
A sister blog with interesting contributions on what open source software researcher can use to work sustainable …
Apr 10, 2011
Michael
 

Psychology as a reproducible Science

Methods
R
Is Psychology ready for reproducible research?
Mar 15, 2011
Michael
 

Blog-attack

Decision Making
Here is what Andrew Gelman writes about an interview Colin Camerer gave on Spousomonics … Looking forward to Camerer’s reply …
Mar 1, 2011
Michael
 

Where you end up, having a PhD

Science
The illustrated guide from Kindergarten to PhD …
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Aug 18, 2010
Michael
 

two good things come together

Methods
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…
Jul 15, 2010
Michael
 

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…
Jul 13, 2010
Michael
 

R goes cloud

Methods
R
Statistics
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…
Apr 17, 2010
Michael
 

LaTeX looks more scientific

Methods
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…
Mar 18, 2010
Michael
 

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).
Dec 22, 2009
Michael
 

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…
Dec 12, 2009
Michael
 

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.…
Oct 25, 2009
Michael
 

R flashmob

R
Statistics
From: The R Flashmob Project
Subject: R Flashmob #2
Sep 7, 2009
Michael
 

Flashlight paper draft

Science
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…

Jul 13, 2009
Michael
 

LaTeX tips

Methods
Two things are often bothering when one starts to work with LaTeX: in text referencing of literature and Umlaute (for our German speaking friends) ****
Jun 25, 2009
Michael
 

XAMPP activating mysql

Methods
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.…
Jun 17, 2009
Michael
 

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…
Jun 14, 2009
Michael
 

Inference and R

R
Statistics
Dan Goldstein posted a short overview of Inference which allows working with R code in Microsoft Office and Excel.
Jun 5, 2009
Michael
 

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…
May 17, 2009
Michael
 

Priority Heuristic comment

Decision Making
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…
Mar 17, 2008
MSM
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