Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the “Replication Crisis” in the Social Sciences

Poster
Image
Poster
Date

Researchers have discovered that many important findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, sociology, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them (using different datasets) or reproduce them (using the same datasets with different methods).  Growing awareness about these issues is often referred to as a “crisis”.  This panel brings together experts from psychology, economics, and computer science for an interdisciplinary discussion of the key issues in these debates, including potential causes and remedies to increase the replicability and reproducibility of research.

This event is co-sponsored by the UMass Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) and the UMass Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR).

Speaker
Anna Dreber, Brian Nosek, David Jensen
Speaker Biography

Anna Dreber is the Johan Björkman Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research is mainly in meta-science and behavioral economics and focuses on replications and predicting replication outcomes in economics and psychology, but also explores topics such as hormones and economic decision making. Anna is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and an associate editor at the Journal of Political Economy.

David Jensen is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Director of the Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI).  He directs the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory.  His current research focuses on machine learning and data science for analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems.  His work focuses on methods for constructing accurate causal models from observational and experimental data, with applications to social science, fraud detection, security, and systems management. 

Brian Nosek is co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (http://cos.io/) that operates the OSF (http://osf.io/)--a collaborative management service for registering studies and archiving and sharing research materials and data. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He co-founded Project Implicit (http://projectimplicit.net/), a multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition--thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals.

About the sponsors — This event is co-sponsored by the UMass Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) and the UMass Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR).  CSSI is a diverse interdisciplinary community using computational models and methods to help us understand the social world. CSSI hosts periodic talks and workshops related to current events and longer-term research in computational social science.  To be notified of these events directly, please subscribe to CSSI-events by sending email to cssi-events-subscribe@cs.umass.edu, and to join CSSI as a faculty affiliate, please email David Jensen and Ina Ganguli. ISSR provides resources and support for researchers using social science methods, seeking to take part in collaborative and interdisciplinary research, doing publicly engaged research, and seeking external funding for research.  For more information about ISSR mailing lists and programs, please visit the ISSR webpage.