Q&A: How does Psychology Professor Brian Nosek Think We Can Improve Scientific Research?

For research scientists, transparency in how they design their studies and gather data can play a key role in building public confidence in their methods and conclusions. University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek has been at the forefront of a movement to improve transparency and to improve research methods to accelerate progress in science.

Most notably, Nosek co-developed the Implicit Association Test, a method that has advanced research and raised public awareness of implicit bias. He also co-founded three nonprofit organizations: Project Implicit to advance research and education about implicit bias, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science to improve the research culture in the field of psychology, and the Center for Open Science (COS) to improve rigor, transparency, integrity and reproducibility across research disciplines.

As part of UVA’s Page-Barbour Lectures series, Nosek will deliver three public lectures this week on the importance of employing a scientifically sound approach to verifying new findings and his vision for the future of scientific research. Founded in 1907, the prestigious lecture series has featured talks by President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, poets T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, as well as acclaimed philosophers, scientists and social scientists presenting “some fresh aspect or aspects of the department of thought.”

Nosek spoke with Arts & Sciences about his work and his upcoming Page-Barbour lectures.

Q: What was your motivation for co-founding the Center for Open Research?

A: The origins stem from my lab’s basic research interest at UVA, which is the gap between values and practices. What we think we should do, what we want to do and what we're trying to do, versus what we actually do in our everyday behavior. And most of the original work was about how we make judgments about people and ourselves in social circumstances, by race or age or gender or otherwise, that might be different than what we intend.

So, the Center for Open Science is really a practical application of that interest in the gap between scientific values and scientific practices. Why is there a gap, and how might we address that gap? Our goal is to try to improve the rigor of research, the reliability of the research evidence, and the trustworthiness of the research that we produce to accelerate knowledge production.

Q: Why is it so important today to focus on this concept of research integrity?

A: It has always been important and challenging because scientists are human, and as a human endeavor, science is prone to the same kinds of reasoning biases that any other human activity is. As a researcher, I want my ideas to be true. I want to be rewarded for my work. I want to gain credit, and those things may have an impact on my research and the validity of my research in ways that I don't intend.

That’s a general phenomenon that has been going on forever, but there are also unique challenges today, including a declining trust in institutions in general. Not just science, not just government, but every institution has seen in the current climate a decline in trust by the public. And there are many potential causes of that, but science as an activity needs to step up, because it has ways that it can show its trustworthiness.”

Q: Your first lecture (Tuesday, Feb. 24) covers the value of redoing research for “reproducibility, robustness and replicability”? Why is that important?

A: “Repeatability is a core element of what helps to produce generalizable knowledge. I say I have found this thing, and I explain it, and we can use this knowledge that I now have gained to develop a treatment, to provide a solution, to change our everyday practice, to benefit from that knowledge. But there is a part of it that requires us to ask, ‘Can you show that you can repeat this? Given the right conditions, do you see the same results?’

Researchers value repeatability in theory, but it is not done or rewarded enough in practice. [NB1] What we show is that with a number of different studies, establishing the repeatability of evidence is much harder than we've recognized over the last several decades, and we need to put, perhaps, more emphasis on that as a standard verification practice in science to help accelerate knowledge.

Q: In your opinion, why is it difficult in the current research culture to practice repeatability?

A: That’s the topic of my second lecture. The currency of advancement in academic research, especially academic science, is the publication of papers. The goal is to produce as many papers as you can in the most prestigious outlets that will publish them.

And with that demand, you start to think, ‘I need to then produce research that will get me papers in prestigious outlets.’ So, I have to produce novel findings. Those are much more publishable than repeating research that verifies the work of others. Science is hard, and it's hard to produce novel results, but that's what the reward system demands of us. And so, we put to the side repeatability as something that we spend our time on, because we're just not rewarded for it in the same way.

Q: In the third lecture, you will discuss ways to start and sustain research culture committed to continuously improving its methods. Where do we start?

A: In the final lecture, I’m talking about the Center for Open Science and its work over the last 12 years. We see the importance of scaling and sustaining open research practice as a challenge, one that can democratize access to research, expand transparency and improve accountability..[NB2]  We have developed and implemented a model of culture change that comes from work in the social and behavioral sciences. We are applying that model to change the research culture to increase the value of transparency and rigor of research. Ultimately, we want to align research incentives with scholarly values so that researchers are rewarded for doing the best work they can to advance knowledge.

The 2026 Page-Barbour Lectures , scheduled for Feb. 24, 25 and 26, are free and open to the public. Each lecture will be held in the University of Virginia’s Nau Hall, room 101:

·      6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 24: “Repeatability: Redoing research for reproducibility, robustness, and replicability reveals reliability and rigor risks”

·      5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25: “Living one’s values in a research culture that does not necessarily share them”

·      5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26: “Start, scaling and sustaining a continuously improving research culture”