Data Science & Psychology Data Science applied to Values, Morals, Politics, & things that matter.

10Jun/13

All Scientific Research Should Be Crowdsourced

Very few days go by without a new article describing the limits of published scientific research.  The headline cases are about scientists who plagarize or completely fabricate data.  Yet, in my experience, most scientists are actually quite ethical, meticulous, hard-working, and really concerned with finding the truth.  Still, non-scientists would likely be surprised to know [...]

25Apr/13

Big Data Stocks? Invest in Data, not in Tools.

I want to invest in “big data stocks”.  After all, everyone is saying that big data is the future of health care, education, government, business, and will literally change the world.  As someone who works with data both as an academic at USC and as the principal data scientist at Ranker, I am the type [...]

22Jul/12

The Open Semantic Future of Psychology & Social Science

This weekend, I submitted a talk which considers how semantic technology will help us answer future questions for consideration at SXSW as well as helped edit a chapter on Moral Foundations Theory that contains a section on the future of moral psychology.  I have a lot of thoughts on the future of moral psychology, many [...]

17May/12

When should we believe social science findings?

Recently, some colleagues of mine forwarded me this article from the Weekly Standard concerning the use of social science to delegitimize conservatism.  There are some valid points in this article that the author uses to question specific studies.  However, I think the author fails to understand the breadth of evidence that underlies most social science [...]

5Apr/12

Big Data Should Measure Value Fit

I gave a presentation at South by Southwest earlier this month.  I appreciate the many people who voted for my idea, who attended my talk, and who gave me feedback via twitter or face to face afterwards. It was a great experience.
It was a great experience, not for the people I met or for the thrill of speaking , [...]

6Mar/12

Five ways that technology will democratize social science

I currently work as both a researcher at USC and as the Director of Data Science at Ranker.com.  Some people would consider these two roles to be somewhat tangential, but increasingly, I’m finding that there is a lot of overlap.  Technological methods are increasingly of use in social science at the same time as social [...]

20Feb/12

The importance of wisdom in social science research

Almost all social psychologists are smart, but few are wise.  I would argue that you can’t advance our collective understanding of the human condition by being smart, without also adding some wisdom to give context to what you study.
For example, the most essential paradigm in social psychology is the experiment and the more controlled the [...]

11Sep/11

Does social psychology try too hard to be perceived as a “science”?

I recently read this article in the American Psychological Society’s magazine, the Observer, and it reminded me of this article by Paul Rozin, detailing how social psychology’s desire to be perceived as more scientific has led it to restrict the range of methods deemed acceptable (an over reliance on confirmatory rather than exploratory methods).  As [...]

15Feb/11

Psychology is generally Continuous, not Categorical

We live in a world where we often have to make categorical decisions.  We date someone or we don’t.  We marry them or we don’t.  We hire someone or we don’t.  We pick either the Democrat or the Republican.  There is no middle ground.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t necessarily organized in that fashion.  Few would believe [...]

Tagged as: No Comments
10Feb/11

Can liberal academics study conservative ideology?

Recently, Jon Haidt gave a talk at the main social psychology conference about the statistically impossible lack of diversity in social psychology, meaning that the vast majority of social psychologists are liberal, with a smattering of libertarians or moderates and close to zero self-identified conservatives. This talk was covered in this New York Times [...]