6. Toby Wise: Risk perception about COVID-19, natural experiments, and open science

Dec 11, 2020

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Toby Wise is a postdoc at UCL and Caltech. He uses computational modelling and neuroimaging to study the mechanisms underlying anxiety and depression. I first encountered Toby when he and I published separate preprints on PsyArXiv on the same topic (risk perception for COVID-19) within a few hours of each other.

In this conversation, we talk about doing research about COVID-19: why we decided to do it, practical considerations, and differences and similarities between our studies. We also talk about open science practices.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (Apple/Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:11: The origin of Toby's research project on risk perception about COVID-19
0:13:18: What Toby would do differently if he could go back in time
0:20:45: Criticism of COVID-19 research
0:29:17: How to do good science during natural experiments
0:44:09: Open Code, (Jupyter/RMarkdown) Notebooks, and Python
1:07:43: Comparing COVID responses across and within countries
1:27:36: Practicalities of doing research on COVID-19
1:34:19: External validity of psychological research
1:48:30: Toby's acute awareness of how unimportant his research is
2:06:32: Simulations to ensure your study actually does what you want it to do
2:14:34: Comparing Toby and Ben's COVID studies

Toby's links

Website: https://tobywise.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/toby_wise
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=_PD-jwIAAAAJ&hl=en

Podcast links

Website: https://bjks.buzzsprout.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjksPodcast

Ben's links

Website: www.bjks.blog/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-nWNfvcAAAAJ

References/papers mentioned
Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T. H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., ... & Altmejd, A. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour.
Levitt, S. D., & List, J. A. (2007). What do laboratory experiments measuring social preferences reveal about the real world?. Journal of Economic perspectives.
Korn, C. W., Sharot, T., Walter, H., Heekeren, H. R., & Dolan, R. J. (2014). Depression is related to an absence of optimistically biased belief updating about future life events. Psychological medicine.
Kunz, L., Schröder, T. N., Lee, H., Montag, C., Lachmann, B., Sariyska, R., ... & Fell, J. (2015). Reduced grid-cell–like representations in adults at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Science.
Kuper-Smith, B. J., Doppelhofer, L. M., Oganian, Y., Rosenblau, G., & Korn, C. (2020). Optimistic beliefs about the personal impact of COVID-19. PsyArXiv.
Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012). Some consequences of having too little. Science.
Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2019). An exercise in self-replication: Replicating Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir (2012). Journal of Economic Psychology.
Wise, T., Zbozinek, T. D., Michelini, G., Hagan, C. C., & Mobbs, D. (2020). Changes in risk perception and self-reported protective behaviour during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Royal Society Open Science.