Anastasi Lecture 2018

Psychology's Renaissance

Uri Simonsohn, Ph.D.
ESADE Business School at Universitat Ramón Llull, Barcelona, Spain, and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 | 5:30 p.m.
Gabelli School of Business | 140 West 62nd Street | Room 334

In 2010-2012, a few largely coincidental events led experimental psychologists to realize that their approach to collecting, analyzing, and reporting data made it too easy to publish false-positive findings. This sparked a period of methodological reflection that we have called “psychology’s renaissance.” The talk reviews the problems that gave rise to the methodological reflection, focusing on the events and what made the issue 'go viral', and reviews the ways in which psychology is changing to become a more credible science.

Uri Simonsohn is a Professor of Behavioral Science at ESADE business school at Universitat Ramón Llull, in Barcelona, Spain, and a senior fellow and co-director of the Credibility Lab at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Uri got his Ph.D. in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent 13 years as a professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School, and moved to Barcelona in 2017. He is a reviewing editor at Science and associate editor at Management Science. His research interests include Judgment and Decision Making and pragmatic methodology, looking for practical insights about how people in general and researchers, in particular, make inferences and decisions. He co-founded the pre-registration site AsPredicted.org, now run under the Penn Wharton Credibility Lab, and co-authors the blog Data Colada. For the last 7 years, Uri has played an influential role in seeking to reshape social science into a more credible discipline.