🧠 Critical Thinking w/AI Research + 🗣️Can Stories Really Change us?

This week: How to Build Critical Thinking Skills for AI-Driven Research; Can stories change us?; Making Sense of KPI Changes. Check out our Research Lunch Club member interview from 🇩🇪 Germany, our podcast pick on Your Product Design Is Biased - Here’s How to Fix It, plus the latest job opportunities in research. And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our THIRD round of matches on Monday!

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People of Research
June 26, 2025

🎤 Community Highlights

👋 We’re sending out match groups to Research Lunch Club members this coming Monday! Fancy meeting new researchers? Building a few bridges over lunch? and growing your research network? 👉️ Join us!

🚀 Research Lunch Club is matching researchers across 30+ cities worldwide this May - connecting members in trios from fields like AI ethics, cognitive science, ethnography, and UX research. Whether you’re in New York or Sao Paulo or Sydney, there’s a seat at the table.

Start next week with lunch with two awesome researchers!  - it’s like networking, but tailored, fun and over lunch!

🔬 Research Lunch Club Member Interview

This week’s interview is from Research Lunch Club - where researchers meet in person for monthly lunches in their city. 🔬 Our Meet Our Members series shares the journeys of researchers across disciplines - so you can get to know who you might be sitting down with over lunch!

Research Lunch Club Meet our Members #10

📰 Article Picks

🔗 How to Build Critical Thinking Skills for AI-Driven Research: Ilana Krause and Colleen Pate for Dscout emphasize that while AI is a powerful tool for research, it cannot replace human critical thinking and nuanced insight. They outline strategies for researchers to harness AI effectively, such as building awareness of their own critical value, understanding AI's limitations (it's good but not perfect), approaching AI with empowerment rather than fear, and leveraging its strengths while understanding its weaknesses. The article stresses that the real risk with AI lies in how it's used, and that combining human expertise with AI's capabilities can lead to more impactful research outcomes.

🔗 Can stories change us?: Juan Roa Duarte for The Decision Lab explores the persuasive power of narratives by examining a 2016 meta-analysis by Braddock and Dillard, which analyzed 74 studies. The findings indicate that exposure to stories can produce "story-consistent" changes in beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Nonfictional narratives were found to be more effective for belief change, while fictional narratives (especially video-based) excelled at influencing attitudes. While the study shows narratives have a small but meaningful influence, Duarte notes limitations, such as the unknown long-term effects and the specific psychological mechanisms at play, suggesting further research is needed for behavioral science to fully utilize storytelling as an intervention tool, referencing a successful MTV Shuga edutainment example.

🔗 Making Sense of KPI Changes: Mariya Mansurova provides a practical guide for analysts on how to conduct root cause analysis for changes in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), distinguishing between simple metrics (e.g., total revenue) and ratio metrics (e.g., conversion rate). She outlines a framework with formulas and Python code examples (available on GitHub) for breaking down changes, identifying driving segments, and understanding the impact of shifts in user mix versus within-segment performance. Using scenarios like revenue drops and conversion rate fluctuations (including Simpson's paradox), Mansurova demonstrates how visualizations can help identify anomalies and guide further investigation, emphasizing the importance of contextual understanding before data crunching.

🎙️ Podcast Pick

Your Product Design Is Biased - Here’s How to Fix It | Alexis Mook PhD

Behavioral Grooves Podcast · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/1V1EiKS5q22EU3oOn3I0Fr

💼 Job Picks

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👋 About us

We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.

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