Data on the mind: Center for Data-Intensive Psychological Science

心理学研究传统上是通过实验室实验进行的，把少数人带到研究实验室，让他们完成一项任务。但是，关于人类行为的在线数据集的存在--以及越来越多的可用性--以及用于数据收集的新技术表明，一种不同的方法可能是可能的：挖掘大型数据库，以寻找关于人们如何推理、学习和互动的线索。格里菲斯博士、戈普尼克博士和凯尔特纳博士将在加州大学伯克利分校建立一个研究中心，以探索这种数据密集型方法在心理科学中的潜力。该研究中心将与全国各地的研究人员网络和开发行为数据收集技术的公司合作，建立认知心理学、发展心理学和社会心理学的试点项目。这些试点项目将包括检查在线数据库揭示了人类推理的哪些信息，移动设备如何被用来研究儿童是如何学习的，以及社交网站上的互动是否可以回答关于人类情感的问题。大数据研究目前由计算机科学家和统计学家主导，但这项研究的重点--理解人类行为--的问题传统上一直是心理学家的领域。新的数据密集型心理科学研究中心将通过建立研究人员之间的合作，并开发培训学生在这些学科的交叉领域工作的课程，将这些群体聚集在一起。这一结果将对心理学研究产生潜在的变革作用，使其走出实验室，走向世界。通过提出由数十年心理学理论驱动的问题，数据密集型心理学研究将为分析大型行为数据集提供新的见解，这些数据集可能与任何依赖此类数据的研究项目或商业企业相关。

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.