Two summer book recommendations

After a long stint primarily reading fiction, I've been on a non-fiction kick recently and just read two books that I would definitely recommend!

Persuasion in Parallel (2022) by Alexander Coppock, a political scientist at Yale, is a scholarly monograph on how political persuasion works. It's a delightful combination of large-scale replications, strong emphasis on effect estimation and causal inference, and really thoughtful discussion of mechanisms. It starts from a replication and re-analysis of Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979), the seminal work on political persuasion, and goes on to replicate a whole host of more recent studies. Across all of them, the key take-home is that arguments about controversial topics (e.g., gun control, abortion, etc.) operate very similarly across people with very different views: they cause small changes in attitude in the direction of the arguments, regardless of the recipient's initial views. 

In statistical terms, there's very limited heterogeneity across groups in the effect of persuasive arguments. I really appreciated evidence on this heterogeneity question because often students' intuition in psychology is that everything differs based on sociodemographic characteristics; yet this intuition is rarely quantified or challenged. Coppock's analyses take a really important step in this direction. 

The book is short and quite readable (especially given how data-rich it is). It's also very up front about the limitations of the work. There's also a thought-provoking final chapter on Bayesian inference and rational models of belief change that makes a number of connections to computational cognitive science that I enjoyed. Despite being an academic, I am not the sort of person who will sit down on a weekend with a monograph from another discipline for fun; this book was an exception for me because of how interesting, important, and thorough the work is.

On a heavier note, Doctored (2025), by Charles Piller (an investigative reporter with Science), is a screed about scientific misconduct in Alzheimer's research. I'm intimately familiar with replication issues in psychology, but I was still totally horrified to read about the impacts of scientific fraud in the Alzheimer's field. Piller makes a very well-researched and thorough case, working with experts on fraud and scientific reviewers. While a critique of the book by an Alzheimer's authority questions how central the fraudulent work was to the field (Lancet review), I was convinced by the later chapters of Doctored that show how pervasive image falsification has been within the Alzheimer's research enterprise. It's just awful to think that many people have been in dangerous clinical trials due to research misconduct. 

The book was clearly written very fast as there is some redundancy between chapters and a bit of unnecessary stage-setting around various researchers' grandparents (perhaps reflecting a pivot from an earlier vision of the book where certain people were more important to the narrative). But the substance of the scientific critique is so compelling – and honestly terrifying – that I was more than happy to overlook a few minor weaknesses in the prose. Definitely recommend.