About Me

My name is Ravi Iyer and I am a data scientist with a PhD in social psychology, as well as 15 years of experience with database technologies. Among my current roles, I am an active moral psychology researcher at the University of Southern California, a data scientist at Ranker.com, co-founder of BeyondThePurchase.org (a consumer psychology data site), YourMorals.org (where people can learn about moral psychology), PsychWiki.com, and VoteHelp.org, a director of CivilPolitics.org, and a consultant for companies like Siemer & Associates and New Releases Now.

One of my enduring focuses is to help ideas from social sciences reach non-academic audiences and this blog is part of that. I believe that social science research benefits from being more engaged with the public at large, in all phases of the hypothesis testing process (e.g. see this paper on the wisdom of crowds approach applied to academia). While some may see academic psychology and the technology industry as separate career paths, it is my view that they are converging as technology companies increasingly serve psychological needs (see my SXSW presentation on this subject) and psychology departments seek to use more real world data that produces real world value.

Here is a link to my academic publications. I do occasional data science consulting, and am open to short term projects where I am quite comfortable using my scripting and SQL skills to manipulate your data into a format where I can do statistical analysis that I can turn into a powerpoint presentation to answer questions of interest to your organization. If you're interested in inquiring about my services, email me iyerland (at gmail . com). Aside from statistical and SQL/database expertise, I am uniquely qualified to answer questions that relate to consumer or moral psychology, as I regularly publish papers in psychology journals concerning these topics, and can leverage my knowledge of these fields.

I use this blog to write about data oriented findings that I think could be on interest to the average informed politically and socially aware reader, who is interested in a perspective informed by academic psychology. I probably won't be able to resist the urge to write the occasional off-topic observation about whatever comes to mind though.

Selected press:

Comments

comments

Old Comments (9) Trackbacks (0)

christian
April 29th, 2010 - 07:52

awesome blog! we had the same idea for a title and i wanted to just assert that i’m a huge fan of your take on our mutual idea
Chris
May 19th, 2010 - 01:50

Just discovered your blog today, you’ve earned a special bookmark in my mental space

All the best

Chris
Sharon Presley
October 27th, 2010 - 18:14

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this fascinating blog. We have a lot of common interests, as you will see from the email I sent you. I have also done research on political activists, libertarians, and on moral judgment. Let’s talk!
The_Analyst
December 14th, 2011 - 05:26

I’ve done some of your “yourmorals” surveys and find them quite interesting, but I’m wondering, will the research always be so US-centric? I know all the researchers are American, but I’d find it interesting to see how moral beliefs correlate among Canadian partisans (especially since the “liberal-left” spectrum isn’t regarded as a continuous unit in Canada, but rather is broken up into reform-liberals who vote for the Liberal Party and social democrats who vote for the NDP).
Ravi
December 19th, 2011 - 04:00

It’s really just a matter of getting enough people from Canada (or other countries) to take our survey. I do think we likely have enough Canadians and I’ll try to do an analysis of Canadians if I can think of a good research question. Do you have a particular hypothesis to test?
The_Analyst
January 17th, 2012 - 09:13

A good area of research might be measuring something like support for same-sex marriage among people of various partisan affiliations and then somehow measuring the reasons for support or opposition. In the case of Liberal Party members, I suspect support would more be hovered around notions like freedom or let live whereas with New Democrats equality would be a bigger factor in motivating support for same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage isn’t a hot issue in Canada now – it’s been legal since 2005 – but it’d still be interesting to test.
Ravi
January 17th, 2012 - 16:06

Thanks for the idea. I don’t know if we have enough data for that analysis, but I’ll put it on the list of things to try next time we do a big data download.
Clarisse Thorn
March 11th, 2012 - 14:22

I’m sitting in your talk at SXSW-interactive right now, and I just wanted to thank you for being here! Interesting stuff. As a feminist sex writer and activist I think a lot of this could be helpful for me.
Ravi
March 11th, 2012 - 22:45

you’re very welcome and thanks for your interest.