ASHLAND — An Ashland University psychology professor recently received a nearly $1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund a project aimed at improving research methodologies and outcomes.
The three-year grant for $975,000 will begin in July 2022 and will fund four international studies and provide direct funds for three new personnel positions at Ashland University.
Chris Chartier, an associate professor of psychology at Ashland University, will spearhead the project dubbed “Examining the Big Questions in Big Samples: Using the Psychological Science Accelerator to Investigate JTF Priorities.”
Chartier said the goal of the program is to improve research in the psychological field of science by diversifying data samples.
“An ongoing problem for psychologists has been the data collected in most studies only surveys a small slice of the human population,” Chartier said, adding that the term he uses to define that ‘small slice’ of humans as WEIRD — which stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic.
Chartiers pushed back against that problem in 2017 when he launched the Psychological Science Accelerator, an online network of 1,400 research labs across 70 countries. The idea is to get studies a more diverse pool of participants and researchers and to thus increase studies’ chances of being replicated.
Chartiers said a “replication crisis” is prevalent in the social and physical sciences.
“We don’t do many replication attempts. Everyone wants what’s new and shiny. So many studies are done from small, local samples. If a study’s findings don’t replicate in one lab, you’re left wondering if the original finding was a statistical anomaly or if it was unique or what?” he said.
For example, the PSA recently produced its first study that focused on social judgements made just by looking at another person’s face.
The study has been hailed by the university as “one of the largest studies in the history of psychology,” with 11,481 participants from 130 institutions spread across 48 countries and involving 24 different languages.
The study replicated methodologies found in a 2008 Princeton University study that found people base social judgements on whether the person should be approached or avoided or whether the person is weak or strong — based off one look at someone’s face.
The 2008 study included a small sample of students.
The replicated PSA study, on the other hand, had a wider pool of participants — this time including subjects from labs in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. And it turned up differences from the Princeton study, which relied on participants from Western cultures.
“This suggests we simply have a way to go before we fully understand these social judgements in most world regions, and that this data set may provide a good basis on which to generate new theory about how it works,” Chartiers said in a release about the PSA study.
Chartiers said larger studies with large amounts of data produce more confident results.
He hopes the four studies to be determined by JTF through this grant will produce a “massive global dataset” with findings that are more applicable to more people.
The studies being funded by JTF are yet to be determined, Chartiers said.
The foundation, which funds several forms of research, has committed $325 million from 2019 to 2023 for research in its “Science & Big Questions” topics. The topics include health, religion, spirituality, intellectual humility and virtue development, according to its website.
