Business Of Psychology | Data Science & Psychology

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 [...]

Tagged as: crowdsourcing, reproducibility, scientific method, standing on the shoulders of giants, technology Comments Off

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 [...]

Tagged as: academia, big data, data science, technology Comments Off

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 [...]

Tagged as: clay shirky, moral psychology, open access, sxsw Comments Off

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 , [...]

Tagged as: big data, happiness, moral psychology, semantic web, sxsw 4 Comments

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 [...]

Tagged as: marketplace of ideas, moral psychology, new york times, sxsw 7 Comments

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: academia 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 [...]

Tagged as: academia, john tierney, political psychology 16 Comments

Older Entries »