Minimizing Mistakes In Psychological Science

This repository contains text, analysis, and graphs of the manuscript Minimizing Mistakes In Psychological Science authored by Jeff Rouder, Julia Haaf, and Hope Snyder.

In this manuscript, we aim at providing guidance for developing and implementing best practices in organizing a psychology research lab, especially in the face of new cultural norms such as the open-science movement. Part of this challenge in today's landscape is using new technologies such as cloud storage and computer automation. Here we discuss a few practices designed to increase the reliability of scientific labs by focusing on what technologies and elements minimize common, ordinary mistakes. We borrow principles from the Theory of High-Reliability Organizations which has been used to characterize operational practices in high-risk environments such as aviation and healthcare. From these principles, we focus on five elements:

1. implementing a lab culture focused on learning from mistakes;

2. using computer automation in data and meta-data collection wherever possible;

3. standardizing organization strategies;

4. using coded rather than menu-driven analyses;

5. developing expanded documents that record how analyses were performed.

Some guidance on the repository:

• The most up-to-date manuscript can be found under papers/rev1.

• The manuscript is written in Rmarkdown according to the principles described in the paper, and the Rmarkdown file can be found under papers/rev1/p.Rmd. You can open this file in Rstudio and knit it to pdf.