Happy birthday to Speak Now Regret Later!
You are now reading the 53rd installment of this Substack, which means we just passed the one-year mark of this little corner of the internet. Happy anniversary to all those who celebrate. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, my condolences. There are over 3,000 of you now.
When I decided to start the Substack, I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, I knew a few things: I had opinions that I wanted to share and I generally enjoy writing. But, to write a new post every week for an entire year? That seemed—and in fact was—a lot. But I had a yearlong sabbatical ahead of me and made next to no plans about what to do. So, writing a weekly Substack was my major sabbatical goal. My other goal was to start playing pickleball, and that too was gratifying, though in ways that were truly unexpected. But really, my sabbatical was mostly about writing.
My sabbatical is now done, which means that a lot more of my time will be taken up by teaching. This new chapter will entail changes, including to this Substack. I’ll get to those in a minute, but first let me remind you of the ground we’ve covered these past twelve months, including what you all seemed to like and what I was especially proud of. These are not the same.
Before this Substack, I rarely wrote about my personal identity, keeping my writing professional and mostly about psychology. Here, though, I brought more of my full self to the office. I am especially happy with my essays dealing with my Jewish and Mizrachi identity. I have not always been comfortable talking about this side of myself, but I finally opened up about this side of myself more than a few times here, including asking why Jews are considered white.
The post that I was most worried about publishing, but also the post closest to my heart, was my post on how I felt about a small number of psychologists gaslighting the Jewish community, denying our experience of Jew hatred. I had more than a few psychologists personally thank me for this post, including several graduate students. Being a voice for young people dealing with the invalidation of their experience meant a lot to me. I also received one angry email and perhaps lost a close friend. And as painful as that last bit was and is, here is a decision (finally) that I do not regret. I plan to return to this topic soon, including a post on what it means to me to be an October 8th Jew.
My most controversial post was my post on drinking. In it, I argued that imbibing is not all bad, and that maybe, just maybe, our new temperance movement is denying itself benefits that are not only pleasurable, but that generate some bona fide advantages to individuals, groups, and perhaps society. Some in my department hated it because I called them out as scolds. While I regret calling my colleagues names and airing departmental laundry, I stand by the sentiment that we should pay attention to what we lose when we decide to forbid adults from communal merriment. Not everyone hated this essay, though, as an edited version was recently published in Theory and Society, where you’ll get to read me curse in a proper academic journal. And if you want to see what humorless scolds think —doh, there’s that word again!—head over to Bluesky for a good laugh.
My other favourite posts usually involve me making fun of myself. Apparently, my essay on being a loud person made people laugh, especially people who know me. When I heard my wife repeatedly crack up at my words—I’M NOT YELLING, THIS IS HOW I TALK!!!—or when my buddy Yoel Inbar said that it was the most Mickey thing I’d written, I knew the post landed. And it doesn’t even matter that 75% of the commenters thought I was the asshole for taking work calls from my balcony. Because we all know the other 25% are correct. The majority? White supremacists, obviously.
And where would this Substack be without Donny, Walter, and Maude? The Big Lebowski was a constant in my writing, kind of like a rug that, you know… I probably got more pleasure writing my love letter to the Coen Brothers classic than anything else I’ve written, and I might even republish it annually as my new Chrismukkah tradition.
OK, this is what I liked writing and thinking about, but what did you like reading? I shouldn’t be surprised, but I was. You, my dear readers, love science.
Anything I wrote about science, but especially open science and replication-crisis related, you guys ate up. My science essays were downloaded and read at a rate two to three times higher than anything else I wrote. Some of my science posts generated ten times as many page views as my other posts. I was surprised by these numbers because I felt that I wasn’t writing anything new about any of these topics. In many ways, the science stuff I wrote was old news. Who knew that normies would find this interesting?!
Here are the top 5 most viewed articles of the past year:
5. Psychologists Have Been Wrong About Death For 40 Years. Steve Heine wrote a thoughtful rebuttal to this essay, and I respect him for engaging with me. But if downloads are anything to go by, you readers seemed to side with me on this one. Terror management theory is dead, says you all.
4. The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle This was published only 3 weeks ago and already my 4th most read post. People appreciated this post, but not everyone. A few people took exception to my use of the word bamboozle, which connotes trickery or attempts to mislead. I did not intend for this connotation of malfeasance, but more that the field wasted a lot of time pursuing a dead end. Perhaps bamboozle was a poor word choice.
3. The Self-Control Industrial Complex. This post was a summary of a recent paper I wrote with Brent Roberts on the state of self-control research, which I think has overpromised and underdelivered. The bottom line of this post is that behaviour change is hard, rare, and typically short-lived. Can you now understand why no book agent wants to publish any book I want to write on self-control?
2. The Collapse of Ego Depletion. This was my response to Roy Baumeister repeatedly claiming that ego depletion is one of the most replicable findings in social psychology. In brief: he’s wrong.
1. Revisiting Stereotype Threat. This was my most viewed post by quite a margin; nothing even came close. I was genuinely puzzled by this because stereotype threat’s demise has been widely discussed in the media for nearly a decade now. So truly old news. But, given how work in this area shaped so much education policy in the US, I suppose its lofty heights made its fall that much more spectacular.
These were some of my favourite posts and many of yours too. But, if you really loved or hated a post I didn’t mention here, use the comment section below to nominate it. And please tell me why that specific post moved you (for better or worse).
To mark one year of this thing, I’m offering 40% off annual subscriptions through the end of October. That gets you access to everything I’ve already written behind the paywall, plus all the extra-spicy content coming this fall. You know, the stuff I’ll definitely regret. Lock in the discount here: https://www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/happybirthday.
Alas, as my sabbatical is now in the rearview, I need to make changes to this space.
I was writing fresh essays once per week, but with three courses to teach this fall, this is no longer a pace I can maintain. Going forward, then, Speak Now Regret Later will go biweekly. And for this busy fall term at least, I will only compose new essays once per month, meaning that I will also republish lightly edited older posts once per month. The good news? I’ll mostly republish paywalled posts, so they’ll be new to most of you.
Now here’s where I need your help: what do you want me to write about next? I have written about nearly everything I initially planned to write about, and now I want to leave the topics of my writing in your hands. Please use the comment section below to tell me what you want to hear from me about? Have a topic you think could use the Mickey-treatment? Send it my way. Read an article that made your blood boil or your heart sing? Send it to me and tell me why you think I should write about it.
Before going, I want to thank you all from the very bottom of my heart. Writing this Substack was the best thing I did this past year, and I have you to thank for keeping me going. Although I would like to think that I wouldn’t care if no one read what I was laying down, I care. As much as the Dude is my hero, turns out I’m not as chill as him.
That so many of you were moved by what I had to say each week made this journey worthwhile. Even when you were calling me an asshole. So, I am grateful for each one of you. You, yes you, made my sabbatical so special.
Another excellent post. You were 100% right on 4 of the 5, and possibly the 5th, too. Chen ... et al ... Heine's paper was enough to move me from "completely dead" to "hmmm, maybe just on life support, in a coma."
Added value. I have a paper we never pubbed, on how replicable social psych stuff is, based on all sorts of sources. Problem is, "did it replicate" is a q that can be empirically assessed in lots of different ways, that do not necessarily lead to the same results/conclusions. What follows probably should only be done with: 1. studies that have been pre-registered and the prereg actually followed (goldish standard=registered replic reports) or 2. pubbed by people with impeccable credibility (e.g., Kahneman). Anything else is subject to pub biases, and if there are pub biases, this is not useful.
STILL, here is a very simple way to do it that, I think, has some value. The core problem is this: If there is no there there, successful replics at p<.05 will only occur 1/20 times, IF there is no pub bias. So what should we make of an otherwise credible lit that has 5 successful and 15 unsuccessful replics? That's A LOT of failed replics. But success is > 1/20.
Compute a simple binomial! What's the probability that something that has a 1/20 chance will occur 5/20 times? I use this online binom calculator:
https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial
The answer for my hypothetical is .0025. So this is below .01, which we've mostly taken to using as the threshold for "should we take our own, or anyone else's, results seriously" given the difficulty of replicating stuff at .05>p>.01. So such a lit means there is probably a real effect in there. I never did this for TMT, but, heuristically, it might capture what is going on there.
Disclosure: I have a TMT paper that found the effect (on antisemitism!) in three experiments. Should you believe it? Who the hell knows? No one has tried to replicate it, so I do not want to make too much of it. Just disclosing my semi-vested (I am not really *that* invested in this) interest here.
Still, even if there is a weak/fragile effect there, you are still 90%+ right on it, because the effects are not what they were cracked up to be.
On the other 4, you were completely right. "Bamboozle" is the right term to use for implicit bias claims, because, even if the advocates were "earnest" in the unjustified claims they promoted, it is because they leapt to conclusions w/o adequate evidence. So, at best, its self-deception. Bill von Hipple has a great paper in BBS on the evolution of self-deception. TL;DR: the theory argues that self-deception evolved because if we earnestly believe the nonsense we promote, we will be more persuasive to others. No one would shrink from calling beliefs in bizarre conspiracy theories, such as Qanon (the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles) or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion "bamboozling" just because someone earrnestly believes them.
Very nice post.
You are a rockstar for having accomplished a year of weekly essays! I’m so proud of you, as always. 💗