2024 College and University Fund Lecture Series
The dominant paradigm of experimental social and behavioral science views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment’s specific conditions. But in reality, the process of reconciling findings from many different experiments conducted in different settings happens either inefficiently or not at all. I argue that this ‘incommensurability problem’ has arisen out of an historical emphasis in social science on the advancement of individual theories in isolation rather than on integrating competing theories, where the goal is to generalize to (i.e. predict) cases or conditions that we have not already seen. Here I outline an approach, integrative experiment design, that effectively inverts the usual sequence of social scientific reasoning, starting first with the question of generalization (“over what domain do I want my theory to apply?”), then conducting the relevant experiments and analysis, and only then interpreting the results in terms of existing (or new) theory. I will illustrate how to apply the integrative experiment design approach with an example from research on team performance.
Speakers
Duncan J. Watts
Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist interested in social and organizational networks, collective dynamics of human systems, web-based experiments, and analysis of large-scale digital data, including the production, consumption, and absorption of news. He is the Stevens University Professor and twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his appointment at the Annenberg School, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, where he is the inaugural Rowan Fellow. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences. He directs the Computational Social Science Lab at Penn.
About the Lecture Series
For more than 100 years, the Social Science Research Council has mobilized policy-relevant social and behavioral science aimed at finding actionable solutions to pressing societal challenges. The Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences is a network of nearly 50 research institutions that support our work to foster innovative and solutions-oriented social and behavioral science. In this virtual lecture series, faculty from College and University Fund member institutions share their work to understand how to pursue research that solves problems.
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