Psychological research has traditionally been conducted using laboratory experiments, bringing a small number of people into a research laboratory and asking them to complete a task. But the existence--and increasing availability--of online datasets on human behavior and new technologies for data collection suggests a different approach might be possible: mining large databases for clues about how people reason, learn, and interact. Dr. Griffiths, Dr. Gopnik, and Dr. Keltner will establish a research center at the University of California, Berkeley to explore the potential of this data-intensive approach to psychological science. The research center will work with a network of researchers across the country and companies developing technologies for collection of behavioral data to establish pilot projects in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. These pilot projects will include examining what online databases reveal about human reasoning, how mobile devices can be used to study how children learn, and whether interactions on social networking websites can answer questions about human emotion.
"Big data" research is currently dominated by computer scientists and statisticians, but the questions that are often the focus of this research "understanding human behavior" have traditionally been the domain of psychologists. The new research center for data-intensive psychological science will bring these groups together by establishing collaborations between researchers and developing a curriculum for training students to work at the intersection of these disciplines. The results will be potentially transformative for psychological research, taking it out of the laboratory and into the world. By asking questions that are motivated by decades of psychological theory, data-intensive psychological research will provide new insights into analyzing large behavioral datasets that are potentially relevant to any research project or commercial enterprise that relies upon this kind of data.
