The SWE colloquium on Thursday 19 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Daniel Lakens, Associate Professor, Human-Technology Interaction Group, Eindhoven University of Technology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

The new heuristics

Scientific reform in the last decade has lead to a wide range of proposed changes in how we design, analyze, report, and publish scientific findings. As the implementation of better research practices spreads through the scientific community, there is a risk of merely changing old flawed heuristics with new flawed heuristics. In this talk, the speaker will discuss some examples of norms scientists rely on when they design and analyze studies, and that editors rely on when evaluating work, without knowing why these norms exist, or whether these norms make sense. The speaker will try to argue this is a problem, and invite you to think along about ways in which scientists can learn to justify the choices they make when they do or evaluate research, instead of merely following norms.