Cat Hicks

Psychologist for Software Teams. Defender of the mismeasured. Co-host at Change, Technically: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

🦄🏳️‍🌈 she/they

Studying how developers thrive. I care about how people form beliefs about learning and build strategies for resilience, productivity & motivation. Quant Psych PhD (but with a love for qual).

Founded: Catharsis Consulting, Developer Success Lab
Neighborhood Cool Aunt of Science

Podcast: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/
Blog: https://www.drcathicks.com/blog
Developer Science: https://www.drcathicks.com/projects

Public Key

npub18g0d4j2g7k6zll4jkr4clkp6vuurlyakdsrs2f4fv0ywnqfmjhuqm00a9e

NIP-05 Address

grimalkina_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsr58k6e9y0tdp0l6etp6u0mqaxwwpljwmxcpc9y65k8j8fsyaet7q7tzr8c

Author Public Key

npub18g0d4j2g7k6zll4jkr4clkp6vuurlyakdsrs2f4fv0ywnqfmjhuqm00a9e

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Last Notes

2024-09-12 18:55:15

I think it's probably about time to make a general announcement that after two INTENSE years sciencing in public I'm going into committed rest, recovery, family & focus time for the rest of 2024 ☺️.
If it's not something already in motion, I will most definitely be slow if not entirely offline on following up on brand new invites, chats, talk requests, collaboration opps, etc. Please know this is circumstantial & I still welcome them (for '25!)
Excited to be resting and (hopefully) creating. 🌲

2024-09-09 23:22:33

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I haven't read those others but as far as I've got and I've heard, less! It is really clear he cared deeply about being accessible. You *could* get into tons of math I'm sure but I think one would be able to soak up loads of interesting things without ever being interested in that. Also a YouTube series and course materials! https://github.com/rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2024

2024-09-09 23:09:38

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This is a bold claim because I'm only in the beginning but I'm ready

2024-09-09 23:09:13

Statistical Rethinking might be the best textbook I've ever read

2024-09-08 16:20:07

I like that I'm so consistent I can cite myself five separate times to make the point that "learning is a key part of technical problem-solving so we should probably stop being asshats about people doing it"

2024-09-07 18:18:36

Unpacking the ancient little backpack that faithfully accompanied me across tech conferences presenting psychology for the last two years (I no longer am to do public science presentation as part of my current gig).
So bittersweet.
Wow did I carry around a full arsenal of conference aids in case anyone needed ibuprofen or a button sewed back on 😂
Took some sustainability pride in the fact that this backpack is the very first backpack I ever got in a tech job!

2024-09-04 19:51:30

One of the great pure delights of my life is that I'm the go-to person for the women in my life to call up when they want to negotiate for a better salary. Most especially when they've never done it before. It's unreal how many bonkers scenarios I've learned about from this and how much we've all been able to share across industries and areas of work just by making it safer to talk about.

2024-09-02 18:17:26

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Here 'tis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027024001997
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/069/324/981/723/785/original/cef1ea887cbbd8be.jpg

2024-09-02 18:15:09

Hello, in our recent podcast episode I went OFF about how sewing and other "domestic" skills can be a great signal of potential for STEM problem solving, and I JUST saw a paper where a grad student KNITTED A SPECIAL EEG CAP for cats !

2024-08-30 20:39:02

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I think one of the great/beautiful challenges for us in thinking about valuing human achievement in our society is exactly on this -- how can we love, celebrate, elevate and marvel at amazing achievement but without calcifying into one way of seeing it, into overweighting those examples, into missing the layers of cumulative, collective intelligence, and into the aggregation of genius labels primarily to those with societal power. Big, big challenge
@npub12nz…2g6s @npub1h5k…epf4

2024-08-29 19:34:53

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(I mean there are multiple problems to solve here, one of which is the tying of the identity in the first place, but as a social constructivist I am empathic to the idea that we create "ourselves" when we do our highly valued work and I think that fully detaching our identities from our work is probably impossible and therefore how it works out and how it's impacting us is something we should take seriously...)

2024-08-29 19:32:39

If you tie some aspect of your identity deeply to a set of professional competencies AND don't solve the problem of a relatively few privileged people being the only people in your professional field who get to define those competencies, how you think of and feel about yourself in a deep way is gonna get held hostage at some point to those folks' baggage and that, my friends, is just really painful.

2024-08-29 17:06:28

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me googling: "can.....train....crows....to write...a paper that will get rejected by every software research venue.....??"

2024-08-29 17:05:22

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uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh I can't BELIEVE I'm reading a whole new set of papers and convincing myself that software engineering needs to know about this entire cool awesome fascinating concept of cumulative cultural intelligence and UUUUUUUUGH I don't want to write another paper

2024-08-29 17:01:20

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people: "let's talk about developer tools"
me, shining-eyed: "YES FINALLY! Ok so CROWS...."

2024-08-29 16:42:32

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people: "we don't understand AI!"
me, a really overworked psychologist, hissing: "BUT WE REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND PEOPLE"

2024-08-29 16:40:21

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source: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27143
"Although young children are inquisitive and keen to explore the world around them, they are astonishingly poor at solitary tool innovation. New Caledonian crows and great apes outperform young children in tool innovation tasks."

2024-08-29 16:40:04

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I'm not shitposting, humans are CUMULATIVELY really good at innovation and INDIVIDUALLY not always great at it actually and our cumulative cultural intelligence is a fascinating way we pursue innovation??
"Technological complexity is the outcome of our species’ remarkable capacity for cumulative culture; innovations build on each other and are progressively incorporated into a population's stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated repertoires." - Legare

2024-08-29 16:39:06

"Using this AI tool makes humans generate more novel solutions in this task" listen, listen y'all, I actually really enjoy the novel uses tasks or whatever, but you know who else is better than many humans at generating novel tool use, CROWS

2024-08-24 16:46:58

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2) novelty is something many people crave especially in our hyper specialized world. When your professional identity only lets you be one "thing" or play a certain role, hobbies can be an expansive exercise that reminds you of other identities. This is obvious to many folks who say "oh I love x because I get to be this side of myself..."
A cool thing about this is it can have many carryover effects, helping you see new possibilities even at work for who you are and how you show up

2024-08-24 16:44:32

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If you're curious there are many psychological mechanisms behind why hobbies that focus on learning and exposing ourselves to new skills can be healing!
1) attentive engagement is naturally elicited by working at what we call "productive friction" or "desirable difficulty" in learning, the stuff that you can't quite do but that is CLOSE. The decentering and close attention to the holistic world that frequently define things like mindfulness meditation are also happening here!

2024-08-24 16:37:17

The nurturing psychological action of accomplishing something new is a superpower of our minds. Our minds want to reward us for learning. It's so important to gift yourself this!
It's been a hard few months. But also in that time I've learned to bake bread, how to make a fancy skirt, tried a new swimming stroke. I swear I can FEEL my brain healing as I do these things. Good, engaged, small learning breaks chronic stress cycles and pulls you into mindfulness.

2024-08-23 15:26:02

Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), [@analog_ashley](https://mastodon.social/@analog_ashley ) !
On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

2024-08-16 20:26:46

People are like "does being married to a neuroscientist mean you get special Science help with your crazy long covid stuff" and I'm like, I just had a horrible gnarly lung relapse this week and I was taking a shower and feeling really sad and upset about it all and she just burst into the bathroom and threw a huge bowl of ice water on me while yelling NERVOUS SYSTEM RESET!!! NERVOUS SYSTEM RESET!!!!! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
So yeah, yeah it does

2024-08-14 22:44:36

In psychology we often talk about prosocial behaviors, and try to measure some version of this sometimes in a research study, eg with children sharing toys, people choosing to donate to charity, or other operationalizations.
I'm really curious, what do you think might be good operationalizations for "prosocial behavior" specifically for software developers around code work? Are there small actions you see someone take that make you think "oh that was generous"? Big and small examples welcome!!

2024-08-14 00:02:19

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Psychology is so useful you guys, I don't know why we always face such a credibility deficit
(I do know why it's because we ask questions about things about big social topics people would rather have their own narratives about!!!)

2024-08-13 23:52:18

Hm this is an interesting piece I stumbled on and quite a useful citation of empirical evidence if you are trying to get orgs to see benefit in publishing diversity numbers: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-xge0001489.pdf
A common pushback against an org sharing diversity numbers is that if the numbers aren't favorable and don't show progress, this will hurt the perception of the company. This study finds otherwise, that being transparent vs being silent is STILL a perception benefit even when the numbers lag

2024-08-11 16:31:28

I think this is a really interesting thread because to me it gets into the nuance between elite, high performance, very difficult and ambitious tasks versus the STORIES we tell and attributions we make about who is CAUSING the difficulty, and what we have present in our environment that makes the difference here. So for example, a desire for a kind, and psychologically safe workplace, does NOT mean we can never want to organize people to do really hard, ambitious things
https://mastodon.social/@npub1ay2…exel/112944182751648069

2024-08-06 14:53:05

OH my God y'all my wife (she is a self-taught coder who now teaches biology students to code) only just found out about rubber ducking this morning and she's so excited about it 🥹 she's buying 100 little rubber ducks to give to her students 🥹 she's like "Knowing that this is what REAL DEVELOPERS do will be so good for them" 🥹

2024-08-04 18:12:33

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I am more thinking about the ways people respond to posts and interactions there but sure

2024-08-04 17:48:34

Why does sharing any thought on linkedin feel like throwing a book into a wood chipper

2024-08-02 15:37:14

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Having studied workplaces for a while now it is clear to me that transformative impact can come from people who put in THE WORK to not be a blocker, a crusher, a muffler of creativity, and those people are not appreciated enough for this practice. It is a practice of knowing you are not a neutral observer, being willing to stay with discomfort when challenged by a new way of doing things, capable of saying well maybe I just don't see it yet. That space is where innovation can happen.

2024-08-02 15:34:09

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This is somewhat simplistic but overall makes sense when you consider that by definition creativity is going to be unfamiliar, rule-breaking, seem wrong before it seems right, and causes us some friction to encounter. These are things we do not like particularly when we are people-functioning-as-large-organizations

2024-08-02 15:32:28

An important thing I learned in grad school from a great psychologist who had spent decades working on achievement and high performance is that "creativity" is a thing everybody says they like but then the vast majority of people have a strong negative reaction to creativity when presented with it

2024-08-01 20:05:19

Just wrapped up a lovely podcast interview where I said the top skill software developers need right now is not this language or that language but evidence-based reasoning. 🗣️I said what I said 😅😂

2024-06-01 18:06:16

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it's an extremely cool and satisfying idea although as far as I've read still a lot of grid infrastructure to think about

2024-06-01 17:45:30

I tire of all these posts about how much solar energy we GENERATE and so few posts about how we store and transport it 😤

2024-05-24 15:16:23

By the way just a general comment that if I only studied the things I liked and supported personally I wouldn't be much of a social scientist

2024-05-19 18:04:04

I have enough followers on here (👋 💞) that I think it is worth a little thread on how I relate to social media and online conversations & try to cultivate community
1. I am a person, not an object. I have personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, a family, & a life. Angry interactions from strangers & esp those interested in exploiting me as An Example Of Some Battle of Yours are dehumanizing & will get blocked (e.g.: "this is why those Ex Twitter people should be banned by default")

2024-05-19 15:37:29

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"Assuming that people are reasonable highlights the need to engage with people who are the targets of interventions. This turns them from targets into partners and also acknowledges the systems they inhabit. This more participatory and deliberative engagement can manifest in methods such as qualitative interviews, focus groups, citizens assemblies, engagement with citizen science initiatives..."
again 👏 ! But also widespread in areas that would've been nice to cite here

2024-05-19 15:30:59

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"behaviors that might initially seem irrational may be modeled as optimal use of information available to people within the task"
"researchers and policymakers need to exhaust alternative explanations based on people’s goals and social environments before assuming irrationality and to use methods that engage participants as partners not just targets of interventions."
All applied scientists nod. (I disagree that this argument is new)

2024-05-19 15:29:28

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Fits nicely in this week's theme of "context" tho!
"Across the psychological sciences, [Felin et al] argue that human behavior is often judged against standards that are implicitly assumed to be objective and critique this approach as reflecting an ‘all-seeing eye’ that can objectively differentiate rational from non-rational choices. Instead, scientists might ask what people are attempting to achieve given their context and environmental constraints."

2024-05-19 15:15:18

I have NOT read this paper yet so this is not a Cat endorsement yet but the title and premise is good enough to share 👀
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00105-0

2024-05-18 15:57:02

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Great demo of a pervasive dynamic, to get through a gate in fields that activate gender biases we require women to be at the highest achievement level to be treated comparably to lower achieving men
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/math-intensive-fields-have-a-gender-problem-the-men-are-worse-at-math/
Also potentially demos the backlash effect, where socially punishing bias incongruence can be considered more important than getting the value of the work itself. Highly technical women can be hated FOR technical achievement
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308508000051

2024-05-17 15:35:38

Every day I recommit to being in tech for the stupidest but cutest reasons!!! I just saw a customer support exchange that was so wholesome!! Or somebody said "oh I'm not technical" at a conference and a bunch of extremely intimidating og tech people spontaneously organized to be like "YOU DID A DEMO LOOKS TECHNICAL TO ME"
The human breaks out, y'all. The human breaks out. It's there. We deserve this version of tech not just in nooks and crannies but everywhere.

2024-05-12 17:01:41

I can't figure out if mastodon is a high context culture or not. People seem to be expected to give long introductions and do a lot of identity/positionality disclosure, but also an enormous reply guy culture which is defined by low context drive-by. Conversational turn-taking is extremely low compared to other platforms ime, but depth-seeking is high. What an interesting mix.
*obviously, these experiences are all situated within my own network effects, and I'm not well networked here.

2024-05-10 15:52:36

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it is also necessary to acknowledge the deep sociological realities that keep us from advancing: grad students who are massively underserved and undertrained in new methods, the devaluing of "practical statistics" education (despite all the hype about data); if we had healthier more inclusive pathways of learning for trainees of course we would have healthier methods. Many of us out here doing applied science have to entirely self-teach and un-learn poor statistics and poor methods training

2024-05-10 15:48:12

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Folks outside of science may not be familiar with this but there is an absolutely massive struggle across so many fields to think about whether our scientific conventions around evidence from the 1900s are suitable to this century. I am firmly on the side of observational causal inference; the principle of "randomization" is almost never ACTUALLY implemented in the real world and our ecological validity suffers. We need all forms of evidence. RCTs are not possible for MOST questions.

2024-05-10 15:46:23

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Source: "Causal Inference About the Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2818746

2024-05-10 15:45:43

"Randomized trials cannot address all causal questions of importance in medicine and health policy and may have limited generalizability; thus, investigators may need to use observational studies as a source of evidence to address causal questions. The challenge, then, is to balance the importance of addressing the causal questions for which observational studies are needed with caution regarding the reliance on strong assumptions to support causal conclusions."
A challenge of our time truly

2024-05-01 00:20:40

I feel like I should find more people to follow 🤔 where is there thoughtful science content, social science preferably, and maybe just more fun and joyful vibes around these parts 💐