The DrugMonkey Scale

David Ng of World’s Fair launches yet another meme, this one to establish your own scientific eponym. A few interesting offerings include the Teammate Desirability Factor, Stemwedel Index, Higgins-Levinthal Dictum, Gorton’s Law and Sciencewoman’s Law. You will note that these are faux equation heavy measures since, of course, you need to be “quantitative” to be a RealScientist. Gack.

In this post I am happy to present the DrugMonkey Scale as metric to evaluate the degree to which one is outraged upon reading blog entries or commentary supplied by readers. Feel free to use it on this blog and elsewhere :-).

As is appropriate for an Experimental Psychology type of blogger, the DrugMonkey Scale is in the form of a traditional neuropsychological response scale, the classic being the eponymous Likert scale. These types of scales are typically a 5, 7 or 9 interval decision/response option. The scale may be anchored by numbers or, commonly, by subjective descriptors (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree) which are intended to be a more intuitive way to calibrate subjects’ responses.

The DrugMonkey Scale is an intuitive, non-numeric 5 point scale. For the subjective anchoring I’ve selected the most iconic of monkeys, Curious George, who also happens to be the iconic figure for a monkey intoxicated on drugs. I give you, the DrugMonkey Scale!

Paranoia in Research

I’m not sure about the prevalence of DrugMonkey’s conspiracy theories about contemporaneous publication, but I do have a more general comment on “paranoia in research”. In my experience, the benefits of discussing one’s research-in-progress with peers and colleagues far outweighs the risk of having your ideas stolen or being scooped.