Moral overreach and ethical failure in setting psychological research standards by Prof Roger Giner-Sorolla

About the speaker

Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla completed his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and was awarded his PhD in Social Psychology from New York University in 1996. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia and two-year-long contracts, he joined the University of Kent in 2001. He was promoted to Professor in 2013 and has also been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology since 2016. Roger is an advocate of transparency in scientific reporting and has written several articles and editorials in support of improved reporting guidelines and pre-registration. He has taught Master’s statistics and methodology since 2001 at Kent. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

Recent discussions about research methods and reporting reform in psychology have often taken on a moralized tone. I will argue that any appeal to morality needs to be well-informed about the potential contradictions in open and robust standards, showing a number of examples in which simplistic application leads reformers astray. I will also analyse the apparent moral failure to translate decades-old APA policy about ethical results reporting into workable, enforced journal policy, and point to some recent apparent successes. Instead of easy heuristics or unrealistic standards I advocate a focus on actionable changes that maximise the credibility of research.