Warning: you might not agree with sociologists' interpretations of your life

My experience leads me to urge that the costs of being a study participant be explicitly acknowledged prior to the beginning of a research project. They could be covered in the consent form, under a statement such as "the research could make you uncomfortable" or "the conclusions of the research report may not match your understanding of your life."

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2d ed. "with an update a decade later" (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2011), ch. 14, note 26.

It is important to remember that researchers and subjects not only have different interests in the final product, but they are engaged in different endeavors: study participants are living their lives; researchers are engaged in analysis.

Id., note 42.

"My kids read a lot"

[I]n survey responses, highly educated parents (but not those with less education) appear to exaggerate the amount of time that their children spend reading, compared to time diary data on children's reading patterns.

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2d ed. "with an update a decade later" (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2011), ch. 15, note 4 (citing Sandra L. Hofferth, "Response Bias in a Popular Indicator of Reading to Children," Sociological methodology 36, 1 (2006): 301-35).

Stereotype threat around the world, in lots of contexts

In the nearly fifteen years since its first demonstration was published, research on stereotype threat effects has blossomed throughout the world. The effect has been observed in women, African Americans, white males, Latino Americans, third-grade American schoolgirls, Asian American students, European males aspiring to be clinical psychologists (under the threat of negative stereotypes about men's ability to understand feelings), French college students, German grade school girls, U.S.soldiers on army based in Italy, women business school students, white and black athletes, older Americans, and so on. It has been shown to affect many performances: math, verbal, analytic, and IQ test performance, golf putting, reaction time performance, language usage, aggressiveness in negotiations, memory performance, the height of athletic jumping, and so on. no special susceptibility is required to experience this pressure. Research have found but one prerequisite: the person much care about the performance in question. That's what makes the prospect of confirming the negative stereotype upsetting enough to interfere with that performance. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp. 97-98

Understanding decision-making with help of many disciplines

I decided, after a couple of years of thinking about decision-making and time, that in order to understand these concepts we should not look only to psychology or behavioral economics or neuroscience or law or finance or history—we should explore them all simultaneously.

Frank Partnoy, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), Introduction

Everyone has bias

One of the first things one learns as a social psychologist is that everyone is capable of bias. We simply are not, and cannot be, all knowing and completely objective. Our understandings and views of the world are partial, and reflect the circumstances of our particular lives. This is where a discipline like science comes in. It doesn't purge us of bias. But it extends what we can see and understand, while constraining bias. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 13

Models may be wrong, but . . .

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."

George Box

George Box & Norman Draper, Empirical Model Building and Response Surfaces (New York: John Wiley Sons, 1987), quoted in David R. Bell, Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One (Seattle: Amazon Publishing, 2014), p. 86 (attributing the quotation to "the famous statistician George Box")