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Nicholas Judd
@njudd.com

New personal record of desk rejects 🥳 I am taking a note of journals that take over a month for the desk 📖 It is also a unusual situation where pretty much everything has been already reviewed at eLife on our Neuro paper (click for open reviews), now the sample size is just substantially larger.

elifesciences.orgNo effect of additional education on long-term brain structure – a preregistered natural experiment in thousands of individuals
rogier kievit@rogierk.bsky.social

New paper by @njudd.com shows that an additional year of education doesn't causally affect telomere length in old age, despite many (theory) accounts arguing otherwise. It's been desk rejected by 13 journals happy to publish small 'positive' telomere studies. Sigh. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Nicholas Judd
@njudd.com

Lots of prior work has related longer telomeres to a host of positive lifestyle factors - with often the explicit hx that engaging in these behaviors will slow down biological aging (aka build a cognitive reserve).

Nicholas Judd
@njudd.com

As mentioned by others (Rentscher et al., AnnRev, 2020) the vast majority of this work isn't even longitudinal. It is just people cross-sectionally relating telomere length to [insert your favorite IV]. Our paper is (to my knowledge) the first natural experimental design on telomeres.

Nicholas Judd
@njudd.com

There is a serious lack of causal inference in psychology as a whole, which @pwgtennant.bsky.social & @dingdingpeng.the100.ci, among others, have been pointing at! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.comNatural Experiments: Missed Opportunities for Causal Inference in Psychology - Michael P. Grosz, Adam Ayaita, Ruben C. Arslan, Susanne Buecker, Tobias Ebert, Paul Hünermund, Sandrine R. Müller, Sven R...Knowledge about causal effects is essential for building useful theories and designing effective interventions. The preferred design for learning about causal e...
Nicholas Judd
@njudd.com

Using the largest sample of telomere length around (UK Biobank), we really find absolutely no effect from an additional year of education via a policy change. This mirrors our null finding for structural neuroimaging in Elife.