Publications

Experimental research in traditional laboratories comes at a significant logistic and financial cost while drawing data from demographically narrow populations. The growth of online methods of research has resulted in effective means for social psychologists to collect large-scale survey-based data in a cost-effective and timely manner. However, the same advancement has not occurred for social psychologists who rely on experimentation as their primary method of data collection. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of one online laboratory for conducting experiments, Volunteer Science, and report the results of six studies that test canonical behaviors commonly captured in social psychological experiments. Our results show that the online laboratory is capable of performing a variety of studies with large numbers of diverse volunteers. We advocate for the use of the online laboratory as a valid and cost-effective way to perform social psychological experiments with large numbers of diverse subjects.

There have been serious efforts over the past 40 years to use newspaper articles to create global-scale databases of events occurring in every corner of the world, to help understand and shape responses to global problems. Although most have been limited by the technology of the time (1) [see supplementary materials (SM)], two recent groundbreaking projects to provide global, real-time event data that take advantage of automated coding from news media have gained widespread recognition: International Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), maintained by Lockheed Martin, and Global Data on Events Language and Tone (GDELT), developed and maintained by Kalev Leetaru at Georgetown University (2, 3). The scale of these programs is unprecedented, and their promise has been reflected in the attention they have received from scholars, media, and governments. However, they suffer from major issues with respect to reliability and validity. Opportunities exist to use new methods and to develop an infrastructure that will yield robust and reliable big data to study global events - from conflict to ecological change (3).

Donald Trump might have claimed recently that he won’t tweet anymore if he becomes president. But seven years of his tweets—and particularly the campaign frenzy of the past several months—nonetheless offer a one-of-a-kind window into Trump’s brain.We took the corpus of Trump tweets since the inception of his @realDonaldTrump account, and examined what’s distinctive about Trump’s Twitter behavior. After some filtering and data loss, this amounted to about 15,000 tweets. Some of our findings—including about some of Trump’s favorite and most distinctive words—appear in these graphics. But we wanted to parse the data further: Just how much attention has Trump received on Twitter as a candidate, we wondered? And what is linguistically distinctive about how he tweets and what he tweets about?