Ethan Ludwin-Peery

Once upon a time, all scientific research was carried out by amateurs in their free hours. Most of these people either had day jobs, or were independently wealthy. Over time, however, research became professionalized. Today, almost all research is conducted by career academics, inside the academy. But things may be changing. With the explosive growth of the internet, a small number of independent researchers have started doing psychological research outside of the academic system. In this course we will read pieces by and about psychological scientists who are not graduate students or faculty, and not working for a corporation or university. First we'll reach far back and read research from before psychology was professionalized. Then, we'll look to the recent past, reading work by chronically-ill housewives, medical students, sex workers, bloggers, and other individuals doing psychological science outside the confines of academia. Keywords: psychology, cognitive science, sociology

Replication is a cornerstone of science. If you've discovered something, other researchers should be able to try your design and see it for themselves. No one should have to take your word for a finding. But modern academic science often has no time for replications. This was one of the causes of the Replication Crisis - when psychologists finally checked to see if their work could be replicated by independent teams, they discovered that much of it could not. In this course, we'll start by reading about the history of replication. Then, working as a class or in teams, we will replicate several classic studies in psychology. Because we will try to replicate several studies in one semester, a breathless pace in the world of research, we will probably butcher some of them. And that's ok. No research experience required. Keywords:psychology,cognitive science,replication,research methods

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The goal of experimental psychology is to try to understand why people think and act as they do. How do we interpret and use the information gathered by our senses? Why do we pay attention to some things and not others? How do we learn things? How do we remember things, and why are some things forgotten? What is the source of our beliefs? What is the process by which we make decisions? This course will focus on the ways in which psychologists have attempted to answer these questions over the past century and a half using scientific methods. Keywords: science, cognitive science, research methods

Is all of psychology fake? A prestigious journal publishes evidence that people have psychic powers. A team of researchers show that listening to a Beatles song can make you almost a year and a half younger. Many labs try to replicate 100 psychology studies, and only 40 work. Something is very, very wrong. These events are part of a massive upheaval in the field that has come to be known as the replication crisis. In this advanced course, we will look at the replication crisis and the role of replication in psychological science. We will look at the problems that led to the crisis, proposed solutions, critiques of those solutions, and debates that are still ongoing. We'll consider what this means for classic psychology results (How many of them are fake? How can we tell?) and what this means for the future of the field. Keywords: research methods, cognitive science, statistics