Masterabschlussprüfung Ablauf/Literatur

Date of the master's examination: to be announced

Content of the examination

A scholarly discussion of selected empirical studies, guided by the following questions:

What is the research question? How is the research question derived and motivated? Which hypotheses follow from it? Which design and which operationalizations does the study use? What are the results? How can the results be interpreted? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the study? Which threats to validity are present? Which research questions remain open? How could these be pursued in future research?

Procedure of the examination

Optional: Students may propose an empirical article as an opening topic (5-minute free presentation). This should be agreed with the examiner up to four weeks before the examination date if the article is not drawn from the listed literature.

The discussion addresses several empirical studies from the listed literature. The concepts from the meta-literature are presupposed for the discussion and are also addressed directly.

Meta-Literature

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.

Muthukrishna, M., Henrich, J., & Slingerland, E. (2021). Psychology as a historical science. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 717–749.

Atari, M., & Henrich, J. (2023). Historical psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(2), 176–183. (Text-analytic methods and the validity of text-based measures.)

Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

He, J., & van de Vijver, F. (2012). Bias and equivalence in cross-cultural research. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(2). (Measurement equivalence and sources of bias.)

Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Chapters 2–3: Statistical Conclusion Validity and Internal Validity; Construct Validity and External Validity.

Empirical Studies

Cross-cultural psychology

Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., & Kitayama, S. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science, 344, 603–608.

Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., … Van de Vliert, E. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100–1104.

Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., … Ziker, J. (2010). Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment. Science, 327, 1480–1484.

Historical psychology

Greenfield, P. M. (2013). The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000. Psychological Science, 24, 1722–1731.

Grossmann, I., & Varnum, M. E. W. (2015). Social structure, infectious diseases, disasters, secularism, and cultural change in America. Psychological Science, 26, 311–324.

Morin, O., & Acerbi, A. (2017). Birth of the cool: A two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction. Cognition and Emotion, 31, 1663–1675.

Cultural evolutionary psychology

Schulz, J. F., Bahrami-Rad, D., Beauchamp, J. P., & Henrich, J. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 366, eaau5141. (Instrumental-variable strategy; read for design and identification.)

Derex, M., Beugin, M.-P., Godelle, B., & Raymond, M. (2013). Experimental evidence for the influence of group size on cultural complexity. Nature, 503, 389–391.

Muthukrishna, M., Shulman, B. W., Vasilescu, V., & Henrich, J. (2014). Sociality influences cultural complexity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 281, 20132511.

Nielsen, M., & Tomaselli, K. (2010). Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman children and the origins of human cultural cognition. Psychological Science, 21, 729–736.

Baumard, N., Hyafil, A., Morris, I., & Boyer, P. (2015). Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions. Current Biology, 25, 10–15.

A methodological controversy (missing data and researcher decisions)

Whitehouse, H., François, P., Savage, P. E., Currie, T. E., Feeney, K. C., Cioni, E., … Turchin, P. (2019). Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Nature, 568, 226–229. (Retracted by the authors in 2021 following the critique below; read the two together as a case study in how the coding of missing data can determine a study's conclusions.)

Beheim, B., Atkinson, Q. D., Bulbulia, J., Gervais, W. M., Gray, R. D., Henrich, J., … Willard, A. K. (2021). Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods. Nature, 595, E29–E34.