Wendy Higgins

Attended my PhD graduation ceremony yesterday. Gotta love the hat

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...

The Eyes Test knows where I live 👀

The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ may be less robust than we thought | BPS A new paper assesses the widely-used tool.

oh wow! lovely to see people engaging with my research 😃

www.bps.org.uk/research-dig...

My editorial on how journals can earn trust.

We often use journal names as proxies for quality. This is bad bc it’s not valid. But it could be. Editors could make journal name a valid signal. And we could place value on journals that show us how they do that.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Methods and Assumptions: A new section in Cortex

Chuffed and excited to announce a new journal section in Cortex:
*Methods and Assumptions* is open for submissions starting today!

Read the opening editorial here (OA): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/

Wendy Higgins (@wchiggins.bsky.social), who developed all these projects that interrogated the validity of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, has just been awarded her PhD and joined BlueSky! Follow her for more cutting-edge research on measurement and meta-science!

Btw, those leonine eyes in my mammal identification test belong to a Chow Chow (dog) – notice any parallels?

Stay tuned for the final paper from my thesis, which takes a step back to rethink validity itself.

Construct validity evidence reporting practices for the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test: A systematic scoping review The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is one of the most influential measures of social cognitive ability, and it has been used extensively in …

It includes a series of papers critiquing the validity of the widely used Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. Conclusion: The Eyes Test is unsubstantiated, and thus, uninterpretable as a measure of social cognitive ability www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

scholar.google.com.au/citations?us...

My thesis - Measurement in Crisis? A Critical Evaluation of Measurement Validation Practices in the Psychological Sciences - was awarded the Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence.

My PhD was conferred today 🎉 A huge thank you to my amazing supervisors @robert-m-ross.bsky.social @davidmkaplanx.bsky.social, @suttonprofessor.bsky.social, and Alexander Gillett and collaborators @dredeschrijver.bsky.social, @vsavalei.bsky.social, and Vince Polito

Introducing Dr Wendy Higgins and the Reading the Mammal in the Eyes Test.