A key challenge in social science is to understand how macro-level social phenomena—e.g., social inequality, social cohesion, or the evolution of culture—emerge as the often unintended consequences of the actions of interacting individuals. Mass Online Experiments—experiments in which more than 100 people interact via an online interface—offer a solution, as they allow the study of both micro-level behaviour and the emergence of social phenomena at scale in a controlled fashion. However, such experiments are difficult and expensive to run.
This project, led by Rense Corten at Utrecht University, supports the maturation of a permanent suite of tools for the deployment of Mass Online Experiments and eliminates the fixed costs associated with such experiments for Dutch researchers. The suite will consist of four components:
- Recruitment of participants from, among others, the LISS panel, Panl, and respondent samples drawn from CBS, RvIG, or through online advertising.
- A code library of reusable building blocks that allow participants to interact in a variety of experimental designs programmed in Elixir, Empirica, oTree, and Z-tree Unleashed.
- Durable technical support for researchers in developing experiments by establishing a pool of developers with relevant expertise.
- Provision of hardware for experiments.
Previously, ODISSEI has already supported the piloting of Mass Online Experiment tools (see here and here for successful examples), but existing solutions now need to be scaled up and generalised to improve accessibility for the wider SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) community. To this purpose, the project develops use cases to guide development, but also welcomes ideas for further use cases from other researchers, in particular from the humanities.
As part of the project, we have been developing facilities to conduct online behavioural experiments within the LISS panel, in collaboration with Centerdata and the eScience Center. These facilities are expected to be fully operational in 2025.
Team members:
Rense Corten (project lead)
Picture by Jigar Panchal