Can social media serve as a catalyst for psychological science?

I think many scientists are rightly skeptical of social media as a replacement for other normal scientific processes. Peer review will not be replaced by Tweep Review. Methods sections will not be replaced by “Storifies.”

However, it is equally clear that social media engagement can boost the spread of scientific information, and enhance scientific communication, both within a scientific community as well as between scientists and the public. Social media can be a catalyst for psychological science.

Last week Melanie Tannenbaum, Jorden Cummings, Stuart Ritchie and I presented a symposium at the Association for Psychological Science 2014 annual convention on Social Media as a Catalyst for Psychological Science, laying out both the why and how we have used social media to enhance our science.

Here is a pdf of my presentation, with slides and what I said, hosted by the Open Science Framework. I also expanded that into a blog post.

Here is Melanie Tannenbaum’s presentation (“Social Media can be for Science!“) on slide share. I thought Melanie did a great job of showing how facebook can be used to spread scientific knowledge to friends and family, but also to humanize science to people who might not otherwise encounter someone they consider a scientist in everyday life. When Melanie was curating and trimming her facebook friends, hoping to tailor what friends in different areas of her life saw (would runner friends want so much social psychology? Would psychologists want to see so many cat pictures?), she asked her friends if they wanted to be removed from any lists. One of her old high school friends wrote a poignant comment: “I dropped out of college so your posts are the closest thing I’ll get to an education, please keep me on all your lists.” It also struck me that while facebook links to scientific articles are no substitute for higher education, on Melanie’s facebook page they are more than just a clipped article, because they include the original article as well as discussion among Melanie’s social psychologist community. Eavesdropping on professional or expert dialogue is one of the unheralded benefits of social media to me, and Melanie had a number of great examples of good dialogue as well as the benefits to the rest of her extended social network.

Jorden Cummings talked about how a conversation on twitter led to a research project. Cummings Day APS 2014 – Jorden nicely laid out the process of recruiting participants through twitter, negotiating IRB protocols (she had an approved tweet to use for recruitment) and disseminating the results. I thought her experience also showed very nicely how twitter can link people from relatively disparate backgrounds. Jorden is an academic clinical psychologist who studies interpersonal relationships and psychopathology at the University of Saskatchewan, and her colleague on this project is T. Eugene Day, a systems engineer who studies quality improvement and patient flow, as well as care delivery as a Senior Improvement Advisor and Principal Investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Stuart Ritchie closed our session with “4 tips for making psychology on twitter less annoying.” Ritchie – APS 2014 Twitter Talk – 1) Beware the echo chamber. Stuart pointed out that psychologists can lean heavily liberal, and we risk enclosing ourselves in echo chambers. Luckily for us, while moving to towns or neighborhoods that are more ideologically diverse might be difficult, following people who we don’t agree with on twitter is not that hard. 2) Think before you tweet… but also resist the urge to pile on. Highlighting the idiotic and prejudiced tweet by Geoffrey Miller, Stuart agreed that this was a bad idea, and we should avoid such a fate, but also cautioned against the momentum of outrage that can build on twitter. 3) Don’t be a replication bully. This episode has received even more attention since then, but Stuart reminded us what might seem to be a small bit of snark can be spread far and wide on twitter. 4) Finally, Stuart showed us how a bit of complaining on twitter about the poor methodology of a paper between himself, Keith Laws, Tim Smits and Daniel Lakens led to a published critique of the article. I thought this was a great example for two reasons. First, it shows how conversations on twitter can be “kindling” for longer, deeper, more substantial conversations on other channels. People on twitter often recognize the limits of 140 characters, and know you aren’t going to get a roaring fire from a few sticks, but sometimes that’s what you need to get it started. Second, I thought it showed how twitter can level status cues. Stuart is a graduate student and each of the other authors are professors. All too often the water cooler talk is segregated along status lines, and twitter can be an entry for junior colleagues to contribute. Perhaps this isn’t always the case, but I find that on twitter people might not take the time to glance at your conference name tag, or guess your age, and are more likely to react to the content of what you are saying.

Ok, that’s all. I hope that these presentations can help convince some of you psychologists not on twitter to get on, and maybe give a few tips to those of you who are already on or convinced that it is worthwhile.