Fall 2018 | Volume 24

BRITE Lab News Blast A weekly publication from the UW-Madison BRITE Lab

Announcements, Reminders, & Upcoming Events

Rolling application procedure for BRITE Lab small grants this year (Full RFP). We encourage those who are interested in BRITE Lab small grants to contact BRITE Director Justin Sydnor with a short description of the study. Justin is happy to discuss preliminary ideas and he especially encourages graduate students or those newer to behavioral/experimental research to reach out at early stages of their study planning and conceptualization. Contact Felix to schedule time in the lab. Right now the lab is almost fully booked till the end of November. More openings are available in December. For more details, please check the calendar. If you feel that you don't need all the time you have booked, we encourage you to inform Felix so that he can reschedule it for others. Send interesting things to Justin and/or Felix. If you see any papers, conferences, graduate student workshops, resources, etc... that might be of interest to the broader BRITE Lab community, please send along the info to Justin and Felix.

This Week in the Lab ~November 2018~

Yanzhuo (Amy) Niu , PhD candidate of Educational Psychology, member of Peer Relations Research Group , and Felix Zhan just collaborated on a study examining the effect of virtual make-over use on college students’ self evaluation. Selfie apps (e.g. Snapchat, VSCO) have been increasingly popular among young people. These selfie apps usually provide a variety of tools that improve selfie appearance. For example, they could make lips plumper, skin smoother, eyes bigger or face thinner. However, it is still unknown whether virtual make-over use distorts individual’s self-evaluation. Building upon social comparison theory, self-discrepancy theory and self-objectification, this study explores: (1) the effects of virtual make-over use on college students’ self-esteem and on evaluation of one’s physical appearance; (2) individual characteristics (e.g. gender, self-schema) that might moderate such effects. This study is the foundation of the project – investigation of cultural differences in the effects of virtual make-over use on self evaluation.

BRITE Ideas

For this week's BRITE Ideas we want to highlight a  new paper  by Pustejovsky and Tipton on a method for doing clustering standard errors in situations where you have relatively small sample sizes and fixed effects models.  They argue that this is important in practice for almost all RCTs and experiments with clustering. So in the BRITE Lab context you would think about studies that have session-level effects because people are interacting with each other in some way. One of the authors had a nice  twitter thread  about the method and noted that they have written both an R package and a STATA command for implementing the method.  There is a lot of work on clustering appropriately, so Justin wants to be clear that he has not yet figured out for himself when exactly to use this technique versus other small-sample correction approaches. However, this seems like a useful potential resource for BRITE Lab users. If anyone ends up implementing this at some point or looks into it deeply and decides to explicitly use another technique, please email Justin about your experiences so we can share it as a group.

Interested in booking research time in the Lab? View available time on our Lab Calendar; email requests to the Lab Manager, Felix Zhan

Visit Our Website Volume 24| November 16, 2018

Copyright © 2018 Justin Sydnor & Felix Zhan, All rights reserved.