About Me

My name is Ravi Iyer and I am a post-doctoral researcher and recent PhD in social psychology at the University of Southern California. One of my focuses is to help research from the 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.

I also have a career in the technology industry, currently working as director of data science at Ranker.com, and that informs a lot of my research in terms of methods. I have worked for numerous startups and large companies in the technology space, holding positions of varying responsibility and technical complexity. I have leveraged that experience into the creation of YourMorals.org, BeyondThePurchase.org. PsychWiki.com, and VoteHelp.org, which together have reached several million individuals over the past few years. 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 and psychology departments seek to use more real world data that produces real world value.

I am open to opportunities where I can continue to leverage technology in social science research into things that matter. I am equally interested in bringing knowledge of moral psychology to business audiences. I am well versed in both relational database technology used to store data, statistical methods for analyzing such data, and social science research that puts the data in context. If you have an interesting opportunity, please contact me at ravi at aboutmyjob dt com. This blog is a reasonable example of both my writing style and my research interests.

The main focuses of my research (and hence this blog) are:

Positive Psychology - What makes people happy? And what exactly is "happiness"? How can research in this area benefit society?
Moral Psychology - What is the relationship between morality and happiness? What moral ideas lead us to do great and terrible things?
Political Psychology - What kinds of moral ideas lead people to be liberal or conservative? How can liberals and conservatives work together on issues I care about (health care, drug policy, foreign policy & immigration...among others)?

I probably won't be able to resist the urge to write the occasional off-topic observation about whatever comes to mind though.

Comments (7) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

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.