A Virtual Laboratory for the Social and Behavioral Sciences

University Of Virginia, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by investigator): The existence of a psychological laboratory on the Internet can provide an attractive supplement to the standard laboratory because of the increased access to very large samples, flexibility of research design, the ease of data collection, the absence of coercion, and the Internet's global reach. Creating an effective virtual laboratory (VL) will require innovation and improvement of standard laboratory research methods, consideration of methodological and ethical issues novel to research on the Internet, and the creation of straightforward and flexible tools for non-technically savvy researchers to take advantage of the substantial opportunities of VL research. A website introduced by the authors of this application in 1998 has provided significant experience with bringing research in implicit social cognition to the Internet. This application is an integrative effort to build on this experience and to offer 5 objectives that advance this method further: (1) develop and test new methodological advances for psychological research on the Internet, (2) develop an interface for other researchers, especially those lacking the requisite technical skills, to utilize our virtual laboratory research (VLR) tools, (3) provide an impetus for theoretical and methodological innovation for our own substantive area of research on implicit social cognition, (4) expand the education and dissemination components of the existing demonstration and research websites, and (5) establish a data archive for the large quantities of data already collected and data that continue to be collected from demonstration websites. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]