台大心理系

The community of psychological science has recently been struck by failures of replications of experimental studies published in prestigious journals. To remedy the crisis, a call has been made to incorporate more measures, such as pre-registration, in researchers’ practice to increase the transparency of research. There is yet a different perspective to interpreting the crisis of psychology (sociology as well) that causes the malfunctioning of the field—a lack of theory, the kind of theory that goes beyond researchers’ intuition and experiences (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2019). I echo and applaud for the proposal. In this talk, I will use two recent studies of me and my collaborators to demonstrate how we can use a (simple) formal model to guide us, firstly in designing the experiment, and secondly examining whether the result deviates from expected from the model, and if so, in what manner. I believe that incorporating formal modeling into our research agendas will provide an additional impulse to raising the status of psychology and sociology in science.