More time for science: Using Testable to create and share behavioral experiments faster, recruit better participants, and engage students in hands-on research.

Abstract

A major pain for researchers in all fields is that they have less and less time for actual science activities: reading, thinking, coming up with new theories and hypotheses, testing, analyzing data, writing. In psychology, three of the most time-consuming nonactual science activities are: learning how to program an experiment, recruiting participants, and preparing teaching materials. Testable (www.testable.org) provides a suite of academic tools to speed things up considerably. The Testable software allows the development of most psychology experiments in minutes, using a natural language form and a spreadsheet. Furthermore, any experiment can be easily converted into a social experiment in Testable Arena, with multiple participants interacting and viewing each other's responses. Experiments can then be published to Testable Library, a public repository for demonstration and sharing purposes. Participants can be recruited from Testable Minds, the subject pool with the most advanced participants verification system. Testable Minds employs multiple checks (such as face authentication) to ensure participants have accurate demographics (age, sex, location), are human, unique, and reliable. Finally, the Testable Class module can be used to teach psychology through experiments. It features over 50 ready-made classic psychology experiments, fully customizable, which instructors can add to their classes, together with their own experiments. These experiments can then be made available to students to do, import, modify, and use to collect data as part of their class. These Testable tools, backed up by a strong team of academic advisors and thousands of users, can save psychology researchers and other behavioral scientists valuable time for science.