Have you ever wondered how large behavioural studies across many countries come to be and how these are organised? We are very excited to announce two panel sessions on multi-country replications, which will take part on 22nd August 2021 as part of the Junior Researcher Programme Conference. Panel 1, moderated by Hannes Jarke, will take place from 10-12 a.m. UK time, while panel 2, moderated by Shaakya Vembar, is scheduled from 4-6 p.m. UK time. Interested to find out more? We have collected everything you need to know below!

Theme

Approaches to Multi-Country Replications in Psychology and Behavioural Sciences

The replication crisis in psychology has reinforced many researchers’ conviction that more replications of established constructs in social sciences are needed to confirm previous findings, especially those taught to undergraduate students and those being treated as evidence on which to base real-world decisions. Ideally, such replications should not just include the original setting, but efforts should—and have been—undertaken to evaluate the accuracy of both classic and more recent psychological findings across countries and cultures. However, while some tips are available online on what these sorts of initiatives should take into account, there are no general best practice guidelines yet and experiences of researchers undertaking such projects in different ways have not yet been recorded in a systematic way. This panel will bring together researchers who have been part of, or lead, replications on a large scale across multiple countries or cultures for a guided discussion which will allow for a comparison of approaches. The aim is to gain an overview of different approaches, what advantages and disadvantages researchers might have faced, what issues they encountered, and what lessons can be learned.

Bojana Većkalov (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Bojana is a 2nd year PhD student with the social psychology department at the University of Amsterdam, where she studies social-psychological determinants of science scepticsim, as well as ways to curb it. More broadly, she is interested in the antecedents and consequences of belief systems such as ideologies, conspiratorial and anti-science beliefs. Through her involvement with the JRP, Bojana is also involved in efforts to make psychological science more replicable and generalizable, having participated in several large-scale replication projects.

Gilad Feldman (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Gilad is an assistant professor with the psychology department at the University of Hong Kong. Gilad’s work is in the areas of social-cognitive psychology and judgment and decision-making. Research focuses on the topics of biases and heuristics, especially regarding agency and action. In recent years, with the emergence of the “credibility revolution” (following the so-called “replication/reproducibility crisis”), Gilad has taken a special interest in the movement for improvement of psychological science to implement and promote open-science and meta-research. More details on Gilad can be found at https://giladfeldman.org 

Lana Bojanić (University of Manchester, UK)

Lana is a research assistant and a PhD student at the University of Manchester, where her primary focus is on suicide prevention. She has spent many years on the JRP Team with her last role being the Director of Open Science.

Janis Zickfeld (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Janis is a postdoc at the Department of Management at Aarhus University. His main research interests are social emotions and moral behavior, mainly from a cross-cultural perspective. Therefore, he has organized and has been involved in several multi-lab projects across the globe. He has been part of the Translation and Cultural Diversity Committee of the Psychological Science Accelerator and is interested in meta- and open-science questions.

Speakers Panel 2 (4-6 p.m.)

Hansika Kapoor (Monk Pragyoshala Research Institute, India)

Hansika is Research Author at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala. She holds a PhD from IIT, Bombay in the area of creativity, specifically dark creativity (aka how people get good ideas to do bad things). She is the recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2019-2020), and is an Affiliate at the University of Connecticut. She is a published author, practising psychologist, and visiting/adjunct faculty at several liberal arts colleges in India. Her research interests lie in individual differences, creativity, and behavioural science.

Alexandra Carstensen (Stanford University, California, USA)

Alex is a postdoc in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. She did her PhD in psychology at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral research at Radboud University in the Netherlands, focusing on the nature of category systems across languages—how these semantic structures vary, evolve, and influence thought. Her current research examines the roles of language and culture in children’s early reasoning about abstract ideas like causes, relations, and space.

Eduardo Garcia-Garcon (Universidad Camilo José Cela, Spain)

Eduardo is an assistant professor at the Health School at Universidad Camilo José Cela (Spain). He has collaborated as a lead statistician in several international projects exploring differences in decision-making, public health policy, or well-being across countries and societies. Eduardo is a strong advocate of open science and reproducibility practices and has led research and public initiatives to expand these approaches in Spain. 

Shilaan Alzahawi (Stanford University, California, USA)

Shilaan is a 3rd year PhD student in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University. She is interested in meta-science and inferential statistics, with a particular interest in the adoption and promotion of open, reproducible, and big team science. Her current research explores the sway and credibility of crowd science. Shilaan is also passionate about using the R programming language for just about anything, which she writes about on her blog at https://shilaan.rbind.io.

Savannah Lewis (Ashland University, Ohio, USA)

Savannah graduated in May of 2020 from Ashland University with a Bachelor of Art (Psychology). She is now the Assistant Director of the AU International Collaboration Research Center and was has been an instrumental part of the Psychological Science Accelerator since its beginning. Savannah has also been a part of the Collaborative Replication and Education Project as a researcher and CREP Assistant. She is interested in Meta-science, prejudice, stereotype threat, and religion. Savannah main goal is to make the field of psychological research more reliable and generalizable which she believes meta-science organizations can do.