• Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)

    BART is a measure of risk-taking developed by Lejuez et al. (2002). A ball or a balloon is shown to the subjects. Each time they tap on it, the ball gets pumped and becomes a little bigger. And with each pump, subjects receive a certain number of points. However, if the ball explodes, they lose their points in that round. They can choose to cash out their points and save them before the ball explodes. In the end, the acumulated points are converted to real-life values and paid to the subjects.

  • Making psychology less WEIRD

    There’s a lot of talk on the need to diversify samples in social sciences, and especially in psychology. With a few exceptions though, most of us talk the talk and but rarely walk the walk. What’s amazing is that almost all of us know this. This is no longer about just an elephant in the room; it’s about ignoring an elephant that is staring into our eyes with a smirk on its face.

  • Moving on: cut.social (removed legacy version)

    We started developing Cut with the goal of running economic games on desktop browsers. We were looking to match human subjects with each other and have them interact in real time. In addition, we had a feature for experimenters and researchers to specify agents to be matched with subjects. Agents could be customized in terms of profile information, avatar, and interaction strategies (e.g., selfish, generous, rational, etc).

  • Case Study: Dictator Game

    Iran’s NODET high schools are known for the brilliant students. A group of these students approached us to use Cut for their school project. They were interested in studying how men and women participants would respond on a dictator game to male and female counterparts.

  • Case Study: How Fasting During Ramadan Affects Cognition and Risk

    In 2018 Ramadan was in summer, starting mid June and ending mid July (Islamic calendar is lunar). I was in the middle of moving back to Brooklyn from Princeton, and everything that could get complicated was getting complicated. We got the IRB approval and launched the study on the freshly developed version of Cut (we call it version 7 - I think its somewhere around there).

  • What is Cut?

    We created Cut to make better use of the web-based technologies and people’s growing online presence in our research. We wanted to deal with three issues.