A. James Benjamin, PhD

Is it my imagination or is Google Scholar getting worse? It was never ideal, but I notice some of my newer work gets merged with older work, and I get some odd phantom citations (e.g., an older article citing one of my newer articles two years after the older article was first published online).

The science influencers going viral on TikTok to fight misinformation Scientists and medical experts are countering climate denialism, vaccine scepticism and wellness pseudoscience on social media.

It's nice to see more academic journals cover the importance of scientists meeting people where they are (social media) in order to share evidence-based information.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Ultimately this is not a tale of hope or despair. It is a simple story of mixed findings that were at times blown out of proportion. /end

That's it in a nutshell. It's a story of a body of research that was a response to a social era of rising crime rates and easy access to violent media. And as most of these responses go as they almost always do, the findings were often mixed at best. /5

/4 The 2010s - the era of mass shootings - demanded answers & what could have been a moribund line of research found a new life. The good, the bad, and the ugly of that set of articles comes to light here. After that we look toward the future - some philosophers have some potentially testable ideas.

Once the weapons effect was considered established fact, a small literature on semantic priming effects of weapons on aggressive cognition would emerge (this was peak social cognition era) starting in the late 1990s (Anderson et al., 1998). We look at how well that has held up. /3

Then I spend some quality time on the initial Berkowitz & LePage (1967) experiment and Berkowitz's subsequent writings on the experiment's implications. Then I spend some time on the pushback and replication efforts that had very mixed results. Following that, we look at Carlson et al. (1990). /2

One of my current projects is a book that will likely interest of perhaps four or five people (give or take) is a monograph on the history of research on the weapons effect. I start out with a discussion of the conditions (social & research) in the mid-1960s that led to Berkowitz & Lepage (1967). /1

Recently I turned 60. Unless something goes seriously sideways, I am guessing I have a good 10 to 15 years in me to wind down a career. I'm shooting for 15 simply because 40 years in one career seems like a good stopping point. I still have some works in progress to keep me occupied. Stay tuned...

As long as the amps go up to eleven.

I did eventually contact someone at Elsevier regarding the apparent self-plagiarism. Roughly a couple months later (give or take), I did get a reply along the lines of "there is more duplicate content than we would want to see, but so what?" I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Plagiarism in an editorial by Brad Bushman.

For anyone curious, the profile photo is a selfie taken at a riverfront trail near downtown Fort Smith about a couple years ago (yes, I still work for UAFS). The cover photo was taken at a lookout spot on the way to Mount Magazine last fall.

Corrigendum to ‘Unresponsive or un-noticed?: Cyberbystander intervention in an experimental cyberbullying context’ [Computers in Human Behavior 45C (2015) 144–150]

I also had to assume that the anchor points for each scale was correctly reported. Admittedly I don't have a lot of confidence that much of anything was correctly reported, but that's what I had to work with. Here is the corrigendum for those interested.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A big unaddressed concern is that even with the recent corrigendum, there are a couple reported standard deviations that, according to a preliminary SPRITE run, appear to be impossible. I made a couple assumptions - 1. the N is correctly reported for each cell & 2. each DV is based on 1-item scale.

About that cyberbullying study: Something is still not right A few months ago , I made note of concerns appearing on PubPeer about a cyber-bullying article. The good news is that the lead author did o...

Last year I noticed some oddities in a 10-year-old article. One of the authors has a rather colorful past (I don't mean that as a compliment), to say the least. Here is one of my blog posts about that article.

ajbenjaminjrbeta.blogspot.com/2025/09/abou...

(Un)Silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts | Navigating On This volume tackles the pressing issue of online violence against academics, considering the diverse forms that cyberbullying and harassment can take, as well

(Un)Silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts:
Navigating Online Violence by
@albertagiorgi.bsky.social & @haeszi.bsky.social

doi.org/10.4324/9781...

cc @veletsianos.bsky.social

I can't divorce scientific content from politics in this age and wouldn't want to, but this is my designated space to share some interesting research, kvetch about fraud, etc. In other words if you remember me from 2018 - 2023, I hope you'll follow me or follow back.

I made a mistake with my initial account by being placed on a number of starter packs devoted to the generally liberal politics, which meant that I began to lose touch with psychologists whom I deeply value simply because my feed is inundated with far too many posts.

I still occasionally update my blog: ajbenjaminjrbeta.blogspot.com

Since I am still a notorious procrastinator, it took me longer than planned to set up this account. This is strictly an account I wish to use a a means of communicating with other psychologists (especially reformers) like I once did on Twitter.