Professional Development Workshops

Friday, February 9, 2024 | 9:00 AM – 12:10 PM PST

Presenters: Michelle Marji; Katherine Swerbenski; Benjamin Douglas; Kendall Holley

Panelists: Mikaela Spruill; Michael Perez; Morgan Jerald; Sohad Murrar

We will present tools and strategies that individuals in academia can use to improve racial equity in their communities and academic groups. This presentation will include a discussion about organizing antiracist “Learning and Action Groups” which are groups of individuals who meet intentionally and often to learn about antiracist topics and to engage in actions to improve inequities. We address why consistent learning about antiracism in academia is important and how this learning can be used to leverage our power to enact change. We will share resources we have gathered across several years including a BIPOC researcher listserv, inclusive presentation strategies, and others. We will discuss ways to implement these tools in practice. Finally, we will organize a panel of presenters who have integrated antiracist practices in their work as academics to speak on their experiences.

Friday, February 9, 2024 | 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST

Presenters: Jan Gerrit Voelkel; Robb Willer

Crowdsourced megastudies involve collecting many treatments created by different people and testing them experimentally on a large sample. Megastudies can be a powerful tool for answering research questions, especially applied questions, because they identify not only whether interventions are efficacious or not, but also which interventions are most efficacious. Ironically, while a central goal of megastudies is to democratize knowledge production by crowdsourcing treatments, to date a small and relatively homogenous set of scholars have initiated megastudies themselves. To realize the full potential of megastudies, the resources to initiate and conduct them must also be democratized. This workshop aims to make megastudies a more accessible and open tool for researchers to use. We will discuss crucial steps for developing megastudies, including fundraising, recruitment, selection, data collection, and evaluation. Through presentations, open discussion, and guided, small group exercises, we will illustrate key strategies for successfully organizing a megastudy, drawing on examples from the Strengthening Democracy Challenge as well as other megastudies and team science projects.

Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 9:30 AM – 12:10 PM PST

Presenter: Hui Bai

Registered reports are a new type of publication with a two-stage review process designed to reduce publication bias. They are becoming increasingly common in social and personality psychology, but the workflow for these projects is different than what most are familiar with. In this workshop we discuss what a registered report is, how and where to submit, how to integrate trainees, and much more!

Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 1:00 PM – 4:30 PM PST

Presenters: Andras Molner; Min Ju Lee

There is a clear trend towards online experiments in the social sciences, especially with the advent of crowd-sourcing services such as MTurk and Prolific, which allow researchers to tap into large and diverse samples and run cost-effective, high-powered studies. However, since these platforms are designed to support individual (non-interactive) experiments, social psychologists studying dyadic and group processes face difficult trade-offs between restricting their methods to offline (lab) experiments, using deception, or paying for expensive programming services. In this workshop, we introduce two free and open-source tools (SMARTRIQS & SurvConf) that allow psychologists to design large-scale online studies featuring real-time group interactions and live text/audio/video chat, without having to learn any programming language. We will give a high-level conceptual overview of the features, capabilities, and limitations of these tools (1h), followed by hands-on demonstrations and activities (2h), and a Q&A (30 min). By the end of this workshop, members of the audience will become comfortable with setting up their own interactive studies online, regardless of their prior expertise.

Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST

Presenters: Fiona Fidler; Simine Vazire

The goal of repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) is to build capacity in peer review. This workshop offers formal training in peer review, using our structured elicitation and deliberation protocol. It also offers the opportunity for deliberate practice in conducting reviews. Over the session, we will evaluate a number of articles together, first privately, and then in groups, sharing information, providing feedback and the opportunity to recalibrate prior judgements. During the group discussions, participants will be encouraged to share information about their strategies for evaluating replicability, generalisability and other important indicators of credibility. We also explicitly discuss the importance of creating diversity in peer review communities to improve judgements of replicability and generalisability of results. In line with our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we will be offering (small ~US$120) travel grant cards to all participants to facilitate more equitable participation.