Cake Club 🍰

Every first Friday of the month (regularly), we hold a Journal Club. Journal Clubs are regular meetings during which current (or older) scientific publications are presented and critically examined. The goal of this meeting is, on the one hand, to engange with current research findings in our field, and, on the other,  to train critical reading skills, in particular with regards to a priori plausibility of hypotheses, appropriateness of study designs to test these hypotheses, quality and robustness of (statistical) analysis strategies and their interpretation and integration into the existing literature. Also, there's cake.

• Next meeting: 29.06.2026, 15:00
• Location: Fabrikstrasse 8, A002 (Idea Lab) or via Zoom (hybrid)
• Target Paper: Do Claude Code and Codex P-Hack? Sycophancy and Statistical Analysis in Large Language Models (Asher et al., 2026)
• Cake: As usual, a surprise!

Participation in the Cake Club is open to anyone who's interested. There is no commitment to participate in every meeting. Anyone who'd like to drop-in once or who would like to come regularly should simply write an email to beth.clarke@unibe.ch. The Cake Club is a hybrid event, such that online participation is possible (you just need to provide your own cake then).

Previous Cake Club target papers

📄Blötner, C. (2025). Extending Lawson and Robins’ (2021) guideline for the evaluation of jingle and jangle fallacies. Behavior Research Methods, 57(6), 177. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02691-6
🍰Lemon cheesecake
📄A scale for detecting LLM-generated responses in online survey research (Kay & Vlasceanu, 2026)
Discussion summary (posted on PubPeer)
📄Adamkovič, M., Jin, Y., Martončik, M., & Karhulahti, V. M. (2026). Confusion in gaming disorder measurement. Royal Society Open Science, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251452
🍰Chocolate and lemon creme cake
Discussion summary (posted on PubPeer)
📄Jaffe, S. N., Moss, A. J., Hartman, R., Rosenzweig, C., Gautam, R., Robinson, J., & Litman, L. (2026). The Bots Ruining Social Science Are Not Bots at All. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916251404872
🍰Mocha and chocolate cake
Discussion summary (posted on PubPeer)
📄Maassen, E., Van Assen, M. A. L. M., Nuijten, M. B., & Wicherts, J. M. (2025). The Impact of Publication Bias and Single and Combined p-Hacking Practices on Effect Size and Heterogeneity Estimates in Meta-Analysis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2uynm_v1
📄 Joel, S., Sakaluk, J. K., Kim, J. J., Khera, D., Qin, H. Y., & Stanton, S. C. E. (2025). Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships. Psychological Science, 36(10), 780–795. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976251370262
🍰 Raspberry cheesecake
📄 McNeish, D. (2025). How Do Psychologists Determine Whether a Measurement Scale Is Good? A Quarter-Century of Scale Validation with Hu & Bentler (1999). Annual Review of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-121924-104021
🍰 Sacher cake
🍰 Lemon meringue cake
📄 Wulff, D. U., & Mata, R. (2025). Escaping the jingle–jangle jungle: Increasing conceptual clarity in psychology using large language models. PsyArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ksuh8_v1
🍰 Raspberry cream cake
🍰 Caramel cake
📄 Echenique, F., & He, K. (2024). Screening p-hackers: Dissemination noise as bait. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(21), e2400787121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2400787121
🍰 Butter cream cake
🍰 Fruit curd cake
📄 Spiess, A.-N., Rödiger, S., Schaks, M., Burdukiewicz, M., & Tellinghuisen, J. (2024). Scientific reasoning driven by influential data: Resuscitate dfstat! BioRXiv https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.10.30.621016
🍰 Coconut Almond Flake Cake
Discussion summary (posted on PubPeer)
📄 Moshagen, M., Musch, J., & Erdfelder, E. (2012). A stochastic lie detector. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 222-231. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0144-2
🍰 Cinnamon Rolls
📄 Stosic, M. D., Murphy, B. A., Duong, F., Fultz, A. A., Harvey, S. E., & Bernieri, F. (2024). Careless Responding: Why Many Findings Are Spurious or Spuriously Inflated. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 7(1), 25152459241231580. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459241231581
🍰 Lemon & blueberry sponge
📄 Wulff, D. U., & Mata, R. (2023). Automated jingle–jangle detection: Using embeddings to tackle taxonomic incommensurability. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9h7aw
🍰 Argovian Carrot Cake
📄 John, Y. J., Caldwell, L., McCoy, D. E., & Braganza, O. (in press). Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23002753
🍰 Chocolate sponge loaf
📄 McManus, R. M., Young, L., & Sweetman, J. (in press). Psychology is a property of persons, not averages or distributions: Confronting the group-to-person generalizability problem in experimental psychology. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
🍰 Blondie bites with peanuts and cholocate
🍰 Chocolate Swiss roll
📄 Haucke, M., Hoekstra, R., & Van Ravenzwaaij, D. (2021). When numbers fail: Do researchers agree on operationalization of published research? Royal Society Open Science, 8(9), 191354. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191354
🍰 Armenian Perok
Discussion summary (posted on PubPeer)
📄 Murayama, K., & Jach, H. (2023). A critique of motivation constructs: Motivation as psychological construction, not the determinant of behavior (Preprint). PsyArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/juxkh
🍰 Carrot cake
🍰 Stracciatella cake
📄 Kopalle, P. K., & Lehmann, D. R. (1997). Alpha inflation? The impact of eliminating scale items on Cronbach's alpha. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70(3), 189-197. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1997.2702
🍰 Rhubarb strawberry cheesecake
🍰 Raspberry curd cake
📄 Cobb, C. L., Crumly, B., Montero-Zamora, P., Schwartz, S. J., & Martínez, C. R., Jr. (2023). The problem of miscitation in psychological science: Righting the ship. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001138
🍰 All cake records up to this paper were destroyed in a tragic fire accident.
📄 Bainbridge, T. F., Ludeke, S. G., & Smillie, L. D. (2022). Evaluating the Big Five as an organizing framework for commonly used psychological trait scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(4), 749–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000395
📄 Zheng, S., & Becker, I. (2022). Presenting Suspicious Details in {User-Facing} E-mail Headers Does Not Improve Phishing Detection. In Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022) (pp. 253-271). https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3563609.3563623
📄 Hughes, S., Cummins, J., & Hussey, I. (2022). Effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure are strongly moderated by influence awareness. Behavior Research Methods, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01879-4
📄 Flake, J. K., Davidson, I. J., Wong, O., & Pek, J. (2022). Construct validity and the validity of replication studies: A systematic review. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/369qj
📄 Burris, C. T. & Leitch, R. (2018). Harmful fun: Pranks and sadistic motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 42(1), 90–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9651-5
📄 Akram, U., Drabble, J., Cau, G., Hershaw, F., Rajenthran, A., Lowe, M., Trommelen, C. & Ellis, J. G. (2020). Exploratory study on the role of emotion regulation in perceived valence, humour, and beneficial use of depressive internet memes in depression. Scientific Reports, 10, Artikel 899. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57953-4
📄 Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E. & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(24), 8788–8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111
📄 Hodson, G. (2021). Construct jangle or construct mangle? Thinking straight about (nonredundant) psychological constructs. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 00, 1– 15. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.120
📄 Dietvorst, B. J., Simmons, J. P. & Massey, C. (2015). Algorithm aversion: people erroneously avoid algorithms after seeing them err. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(1), 114–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000033
📄 Fiedler, K., Harris, C. & Schott, M. (2018). Unwarranted inferences from statistical mediation tests – An analysis of articles published in 2015. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 75, 95–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.11.008
📄 Kosinski, M. (2021). Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. Scientific Reports, 11, Artikel 100. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-79310-1
📄 Rule, J. S., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Piantadosi, S. T. (2020). The Child as Hacker. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(11), 900–915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.07.005
📄 Lazić, A. & Žeželj, I. (2021). A systematic review of narrative interventions: Lessons for countering anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and misinformation. Public Understanding of Science, 30(6), 644–670. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625211011881
📄 Skjuve, M., Følstad, A., Fostervold, K. I. & Brandtzaeg, P. B. (2021). My Chatbot Companion - a Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, Artikel 102601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102601
📄 Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and Individual Differences, 168, Artikel 110397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110397
📄 Bechade, L., Duplessis, G. D. & Devillers, L. (2016). Empirical Study of Humor Support in Social Human-Robot Interaction. In N. Streitz & P. Markopoulos (Hrsg.), Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions (S. 305–316). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39862-4_28
📄 Andres, J., schraefel, m., Semertzidis, N., Dwivedi, B., Kulwe, Y. C., Kaenel, J. von & Mueller, F. F. (04212020). Introducing Peripheral Awareness as a Neurological State for Human-computer Integration. In R. Bernhaupt, F. '. Mueller, D. Verweij, J. Andres, J. McGrenere, A. Cockburn, I. Avellino, A. Goguey, P. Bjørn, S. Zhao, B. P. Samson & R. Kocielnik (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (S. 1–13). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376128
📄 Junker, A., Hutters, C., Reipur, D., Embøl, L., Nilsson, N. C. & Nordahl, R. (10252020). Virtual Womb. In D. Lamas, H. Sarapuu, I. Šmorgun & G. Berget (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society (S. 1–8). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420159
📄 Hoogeveen, S., Sarafoglou, A. & Wagenmakers, E.‑J. (2020). Laypeople Can Predict Which Social-Science Studies Will Be Replicated Successfully. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920919667
📄 Venard, B. (2019). The determinants of individual cyber security behaviours: Qualitative research among French students. In 2019 International Conference on Cyber Situational Awareness, Data Analytics And Assessment (Cyber SA). https://doi.org/10.1109/CyberSA.2019.8899648
📄 Grames, E. M., Stillman, A. N., Tingley, M. W. & Elphick, C. S. (2019). An automated approach to identifying search terms for systematic reviews using keyword co-occurrence networks. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 10(10), 1645–1654. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13268
📄 Hussey, I. & Hughes, S. (2020). Hidden Invalidity Among 15 Commonly Used Measures in Social and Personality Psychology. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(2), 166–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919882903
📄 Talamas, S. N., Mavor, K. I. & Perrett, D. I. (2016). Blinded by Beauty: Attractiveness Bias and Accurate Perceptions of Academic Performance. PLOS ONE, 11(2), Artikel e0148284. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148284
📄 Wendt, C. S. & Berg, G. (2009). Nonverbal humor as a new dimension of HRI. In RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 183-188. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2009.5326230
📄 Venkatanathan, J., Kostakos, V., Karapanos, E. & Gonçalves, J. (2014). Online Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information with Strangers: Effects of Public and Private Sharing. Interacting with Computers, 26(6), 614–626. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwt058
📄 van der Lippe, T. & Lippényi, Z. (2020). Beyond Formal Access: Organizational Context, Working From Home, and Work–Family Conflict of Men and Women in European Workplaces. Social Indicators Research, 151(2), 383–402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1993-1
📄 Goodman, J. K., Cryder, C. E. & Cheema, A. (2013). Data Collection in a Flat World: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Mechanical Turk Samples. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26(3), 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.1753
📄 Lu, L. & Gursoy, D. (2017). Does offering an organic food menu help restaurants excel in competition? An examination of diners’ decision-making. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 63, 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2017.03.004
📄 Halali, E., Meiran, N. & Shalev, I. (2017). Keep it cool: temperature priming effect on cognitive control. Psychological Research, 81(2), 343–354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0753-6
📄 Waytz, A., Dungan, J. & Young, L. (2013). The whistleblower's dilemma and the fairness–loyalty tradeoff. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 1027–1033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.07.002
📄 Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1178
📄 Watt, C. (2014). Precognitive dreaming: Investigating anomalous cognition and psychological factors. Journal of Parapsychology, 78(1), 115–125. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/precognitive-dreaming-investigating-anomalous-cognition-and-psych
📄 Rohrer, J. M. (2018). Thinking Clearly About Correlations and Causation: Graphical Causal Models for Observational Data. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245917745629