When researchers in psychonomics think about ‘ethics’, often the first thing that comes to mind are the proposals that need to submitted to the institutional research boards – how do we behave towards our research participants. However, ethical practices in research go beyond that. Recently, psychology has shaken up by several high-profile controversies, cases in which researchers have misrepresented, misinterpreted, misanalysed, and even fabricated data. In some cases, foul play was evident, but in other cases things were not as clear.

Is removal of one participant from your dataset because the data appears to be an outlier ‘unethical’? Or what about using a one-sided t-test, while you did not have a specific hypothesis for the direction of your effect beforehand? And what do you do if you suspect one of your colleagues is a bit too creative in coming up with new methods of data-analysis? This workshop is aimed at exactly these questions.

Program

The first workshop will take place December 4, 2013, in Utrecht. The program is as follows:

• 9:30 – 10:00    Introduction: how to think about ethics and methodology (Richard Morey & Maarten Derksen)
• 10:00 – 11:10  Cloud storage (Jelte Wicherts)
• 11:10 – 11:20  Coffee break
• 11:20 – 12:30  Data collection with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Rolf Zwaan)
• 12:30 – 13:30  Lunch
• 13:50 – 15:00 Epistemic ethics (Richard Morey)
• 15:00 – 15:20  Tea/coffee
• 15:20 – 16:30 Questioning questionable research practices (José Heesink)
• 16:30 – 17:30 Panel discussion

Speakers

Prof. Dr. Rolf Zwaan is professor of psychology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He studies language processing, and in his blog, http://rolfzwaan.blogspot.nl, he frequently discusses the methodology and ethics of psychological research.

Dr. Jelte Wicherts is Associate Professor in Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University, and has published on issues of scientific integrity, including the improvement of peer review and data storage.

Dr. Richard Morey is Assistant Professor in Psychometrics & Statistics at the University of Groningen. His work focuses on the development and use of statistical models for human perception and cognition.

Dr. Maarten Derksen is Assistant Professor in Theory & History of Psychology at the University of Groningen. He teaches ethics and has published about the Stapel Affair.

Dr. José Heesink is Associate Professor Organizational Psychology at the University of Groningen. She coaches Ph.D-students.

Registration/more information

To register, or practical questions, send an e-mail to Dr. Lorenza Colzato, secretary of the NVP: colzato@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

For questions about the course content, you can contact Dr. Maarten Derksen: m.derksen@rug.nl