Preregistration Of Investigations For The 2019 SSC Survey

This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you’ve read at least one blog post here before, please take the survey if you haven’t already. Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this post could bias your results.

1. Can we confirm or disconfirm different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts?

2. Can we replicate the study showing that people who eat more beef jerky are more likely to be hospitalized for bipolar mania?

3. Are there differences in side effects among SSRIs? (to be limited to people taking an SSRI one month or more, will be looked at both effect by effect, and with a lumped-together side effect index where each mild effect counts as 1 point and each severe effect as 3 points)

4. Is there a difference in people’s efficacy ratings for SSRIs (SSRI Effectiveness, SSRI Overall) depending on whether the person was taking the SSRI for depression vs. for anxiety?

5. What percent of people coming off SSRIs experience discontinuation symptoms? Are there differences among different agents? (main analysis to be limited to people who were taking an SSRI at least a few months, discontinued with a gradual taper lasting at least a few weeks, and were not cross-tapering onto any other psychiatric medication).

6. Are people more likely to attribute success to hard work/talent rather than luck if they are from a higher childhood social class? What about a higher current social class? What about if they have moved upward throughout their lifetime?

7. Are people less likely to support psychiatric commitment if they have been committed themselves? What about if they have a frequently-committed psychiatric issue (schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline, eating disorder)? Are they more likely to support commitment if they have a family member with those conditions, but don’t have it themselves?

8. Is there any support for the idea of life history strategies? (does early age of sexual debut and/or high number of sexual partners correlate with regular drug use, with leaving school earlier, and higher risk-taking? What about with being more likely to ask a partner out early or have nonconsensual sex? What about with various psychiatric disorders?)

9. Do paternal and maternal age correlate with risk of the psychiatric disorders? What about with the various self-ratings? What about with SAT score?

10. The question about labeling vegetarian foods (ie can a burger made of pea protein call itself a “burger”) seems to get at questions of essentialism vs. pragmatism in the same way as controversies about transgender. Do people who support essentialist labeling of food also support essentialist gender positions? What if we control for political identification? What if we exclude trans people and vegetarians (who probably care about this for personal reasons)?

11. Can we replicate the claim that people who had a younger sibling born during a supposed critical window for sexual imprinting (I think between 1 and 2 years old, but I will have to double check) are more exposed to baby-related issues during that window and so are more likely to have baby-related fetishes (lactation and diaper)?

12. Using the same definitions of STEM/nerdy/male vs. interpersonal/creative/female occupations as last time (see Figure 7 here), is there a difference between these groups in the rate at which people perceive gender bias?

13. How does imposter syndrome vary by gender, field, and gender * field?

14. Do schizophrenics (and their families) smoke more? Do autistics (and their families) smoke less?

15. Are schizophrenics (and their families) more likely to be able to tickle themselves than others? What about autistics (and their families)? What about people who have used lots of psychedelics?

16. Is tendency to prefer great literature to sci-fi/fantasy mediated by ability to perceive and appreciate complex emotion? (correlate difference in sci-fi enjoyment – literature enjoyment to autism, family autism. On a hunch, I am also going to correlate this with trustworthiness, which I think can be affected by a sort of paranoia which correlates with high-bandwidth-social-reading, and with ability to tickle self).

17. Do people with ADHD habituate to stimuli more or less quickly? This is a tough one, since there’s a common-sense argument for less (being more distractable suggests less able to drown out external stimula). But I have also heard people suggest they habituate more quickly, which is why they get bored so quickly, and why they so easily get distracted from what they’re doing. In retrospect, the question I asked (about habituation to a dripping faucet and other similar noises) is not ideal for this, but I’ll do what I can with it.

18. Do the birth order effects discovered in the last survey disappear if there’s a sufficient age gap between someone and their next youngest sibling, or remain equally strong? If I have enough sample size, I’ll limit this to families of exactly two people, then do an analysis like this one split for people with higher-than-median age gaps vs. people with lower-than-median age gaps. Birth order differences vanishing with high age gaps suggests they may be due to nurture (eg parents too busy parenting another kid to pay attention to you); remaining with high age gaps suggests potentially due to nature (eg maternal antigens or something).