Experiment Month: Round Two

***UPDATE*** The experiment month webpage, with more information, is now available here.

As many of you know, a year ago we conducted the first Experiment Month Initiative, a program designed to help philosophers (particularly those new to empirical research) conduct experimental studies. I was really impressed by the results that came out of this project. Several papers produced under the auspices of the initiative have already been published; others are currently under review. And a number of experiments were discussed online, here and elsewhere. For examples, see these posts I turned up from this blog:

Intuitions about scientific progress

Antisocial personality traits and conservatism

The mere exposure effect and bad art

The asymmetry of praise and blame

Norm salience and intentional action

Thomson's violinist

In any case, I wanted to let people know that we have arranged resources to conduct a second round of Experiment Month. Proposals for the initiative should be submitted on June 15^th and should correspond to the IRB (institutional review board) format for your specific university. (We request that proposals be made in this format so that it will be easy to submit the proposed experiment to your specific IRB, which will have to grant approval to conduct the experiment before it appears online.) We are willing to offer advice and help in completing these forms, as they may include questions that will be unfamiliar to many non-experimentalists.

If you are interested in running a study, you can send your study proposal to the Experiment Month staff at experimentmonth@gmail.com. Then, if your proposal is selected for inclusion, we will give you advice in refining the study, conduct the study online, send you the results, and help out with any statistical analysis you may need. We also welcome questions at this address.

 

Comments

[David Faraci]

I'm glad you guys are doing this again. Last year was a lot of fun. And it certainly didn't hurt the CV. The results of our work on praise and blame will appear in the inaugural edition of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.

[Marcus Arvan]

I would really like to encourage everyone to apply for this. XMonth is one of the best opportunities I've had. You don't have to have any previous experience in experimental philosophy. I certainly didn't. :)

[Mark Alfano]

I'd like to add my voice to the chorus in praise of experiment month. The study I ran with James Beebe and Brian Robinson got rolled into a paper that just came out in the Monist special issue on xphi.

Thanks to Mark Phelan, Josh Knobe, and everyone else who made this possible!

[Mark Phelan]

Thanks for the nice comments on the Experiment Month Project! BTW, I have changed the post to reflect that our website is now available at http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/XM/Info.html

[Alexandra Bradner]

Experiment Month was a great way to get some sophisticated help with both experimental design and results analysis. Mark was extremely helpful. I highly recommend the whole experience.

[Garret Merriam]

Allow me to add my voice to those who had an excellent experience with the first Experiment Month. Incredibly helpful on many levels. The help I got not only greatly improved the specific experiment I was working on, but also gave much much higher quality data, thanks to their implementation. It also taught me a lot of about experiment design in general. I highly recommend anyone tempted to apply to do so.