Improving Social Perception Research Through Open Science Initiatives

Psychological science suffers from many of the same problems as other biological sciences. For example, low power, together with publication bias, means that a high proportion of published results are likely to be false positives. Additionally, a lack of diversity in both study populations and researchers limits the generalizability of published effects. My talk will highlight these issues in relation to research on social perception of faces. More importantly, I will also describe our lab’s recent work that has used open science initiatives to address these challenges. These initiatives include large-scale, world-wide multi-lab collaborations, registered reports, and the use of data-driven, rather than theory-driven, approaches to understanding how we evaluate faces.