Issues of reproducibility (or lack thereof) in psychology have led to calls for increasing transparency in scientific practices.  Loreen Tisdall and I were curious to learn how the topics of reproducibility and open science – “the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional” – are being perceived and tackled by researchers in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology. For this purpose, we conducted an internal survey inspired by the Swiss Open Psychological Science Initiative asking about researcher’s awareness/experience as well as attitudes to a number of open science practices.

We received 19 responses to the following two questions…

1. Which of the following research practices are you aware of, and which do you have experience of using or doing?

2. How important do you believe the following practices are for optimising the reproducibility and efficiency of research in your field?

Our reading of these results is…

• there is considerable awareness of open science practices in Social, Economic and Decision Psychology, albeit only few individuals report high levels of expertise with these practices.
• there is considerable importance attributed to open science practices in increasing reproducibility and efficiency in our field, but there is clearly some variance of opinions, in particular concerning a few of the practices (e.g., registered reports, many analysts, preprints).

We discussed some of these issues during the latest meeting of the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology doctoral program. There appears to be consensus for a continued discussion and establishing of common guidelines and training regarding open science in our groups – stay tuned…