"We are ready to move!" An interview with Daniel Lakens and Klaus Fiedler on the current challenges in the field of psychological research

 

Can psychological research still be trusted? In-Mind interviewed Daniel Lakens and Klaus Fiedler-two of the most prominent voices in the debate on how psychological science can be improved. In this interview, they offer a personal view on how psychology has changed and how it should change in the future. They describe their personal motivation and how the debate has affected their own work.

Solid science: How graduate students foster research transparency

Reproducibility is seen as the gold standard for solid science. However, three are few incentive to work transparently, and even less incentives to conduct replication studies. To change this, more and more teachers are assigning replication studies to graduate students as a class assignment. Will this turn early career researchers into witch hunters?

Is social psychology ready for the big science revolution?

In this blog post, I will describe perhaps the greatest challenge facing social psychology (and other social sciences) in the coming decades: The curation and increased accessibility of research findings. I describe several big science efforts that lead to an eventual goal – a search engine of research findings capable of producing instant empirical summaries and translating findings using lay terms.

Pre-registration watch part 1: Detecting deception

In this blog post, I will report on the experiences of social psychologists, such as myself, with committing ourselves to detailed descriptions of the hypotheses and other specifics of experiments before we run them. In part 1, I briefly cover some basics about this so-called pre-registration and then I will discuss my own experience with a pre-registration in the online journal Frontiers about unconscious deception detection.

The year the journals changed

Where do all the studies come from? Behind every headline trumpeting a new finding in psychology, you can usually find an article in a peer-reviewed psychology journal. But how reliable are these findings? This is what many scientists have recently started to wonder. Because of this, journals in psychology are starting to insist on better reporting of research studies. In this first post of a two-part series, I will explain some of the standards that have typically been used to judge whether a study deserves publication or not.