One of my favorite xkcd comics is Settled. See below. It’s a cool example of statistical inference. Evidence accumulates for a null hypothesis without any new data coming in. The only thing that changes over time is the expectation under the counterfactual: if Bigfoot were real, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that we […]
This commentary is in two parts. As a contributor to the special issue, I enjoyed reading these commentaries, and felt compelled to synthesize that enjoyment. That’s the first part. The ideas sparked by these commentaries lead to the second part. There I consider a potential next step in progress in our field, and link it […]
What were we thinking? Is it possible to discover how past cultures made decisions, prioritised issues, or which ideas were felt to be emotional or bland, offensive or pleasant? Language provides a fossil record of society, and big data has made huge progress in making historical psychology through language analysis possible and accessible. A step […]
It’s easy to get excited about the promise of big data and naturally occurring datasets. Whether you were first captivated by “culturomics” nearly a decade ago or are first discovering its potential in this special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Behavior Research Methods, you are not alone in seeing big data or naturally occurring […]
Where are we? What are we going to do? During the 1880s and 1890s, Francis Galton collected one sample of response time from each of 17,000 Britons. Clearly, he had no concept of intertrial variability, so one sample seemed to suffice. Times have changed and we live in a world where not only can we […]
The big data special issue from the Psychonomic Society’s Behavior Research Methods is particularly timely. Big data is becoming increasingly prevalent in behavioural sciences and it is arguably transforming many areas of research. However, this change is not one that was planned or designed by scientists. Advances in technology and digital records mean that governments, […]
HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of—of states to—to integrate— BIDEN: —No, but— HARRIS: —Public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate, Berkeley, California Public Schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision. HARRIS: So, […]
(This post was co-authored by Thomas L. Griffiths). Since Wilhelm Wundt established the first university psychology laboratory over 100 years ago, relatively little has changed in how we gather data in psychological science. Technology and statistical methods have evolved, but experiments are still run primarily by individual brick-and-mortar laboratories, test specific hypotheses, and rely on […]
(This post was co-authored with Rob Goldstone). Like many other scientific disciplines, psychological science has felt the impact of the big data revolution. This impact arises from the meeting of three forces: Data availability, data heterogeneity, and data analyzability. Availability. Consider that for decades, researchers have relied on the Brown Corpus of about 1 million words, […]
The goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works. It is a peculiar aspect of this quest that cognitive science often seems to be as much about computers and software as it is about the human mind: There is an intriguing parallelism between developments in computer science and affiliated fields on the […]