The new heuristics: Jumping through hoops instead of improving our science by Prof Daniel Lakens

About the talk

Psychological science has been at the forefront of improving research practices. Yet, psychology is also a strongly norm driven field, and we risk replacing old norms with new norms, without increasing true understanding or the ability to justify our actions. I will unsuccessfully try to prevent you from just adopting the New Heuristics of scientific reform.

Professor Daniel Lakens is based at Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on how to design and interpret studies, applied (meta)-statistics, and reward structures in science, as well as having research interests in conceptual thought and meaning. Daniel is noted for his teaching and creation of useful resources. He received the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal prize for Open Social Science as a Leader in Education, and his course on research methods for young scholars (here) is widely praised and highly subscribed, along with his blog on methods and statistics and practical primers on effect sizes, sequential analysis, and equivalence tests. Recently, Daniel has developed an interest in the importance of (preferably pre-registered) replications and ways to improve how we interpret and design studies. Daniel believes that we can try a little harder to make science as open and robust as possible, and give the tax payer as much value for money as we can, and that science should be a much more collaborative enterprise (see his TEDx talk on this topic here).