HNDS-I: Pushkin: Enabling large-scale citizen science data collection for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences

This project develops a free and open-source software platform named Pushkin, which permits researchers who conduct behavioral and cognitive experiments with humans to run massive online experiments. These experiments can engage tens of thousands of participants from around the world and enable citizen scientists to run their own experiments. The ability to collect data from hundreds of experiments simultaneously increases the rate, robustness, and reliability of knowledge accumulation in psychology and the behavioral sciences.

The Pushkin infrastructure lowers barriers to accessing the results from and participating in behavioral research, increases the diversity of both researchers and participants, and advances understanding across a wide range of disciplines and contexts, including social and educational programs and policies, product design, therapies, and training and development of artificial intelligence.

Pushkin is difficult to use even for those researchers who already conduct massive online experiments. The project adds functionality to Pushkin to make it easier to use. Features are added that improve learning the software and that make it faster to write and deploy experiments.

Additional functionality generates documentation of the collected data, including automatically generated statistical summaries. The software will facilitate the use of best practices in data sharing, which in turn will increase researchers’ willingness to share data and contribute to the rich datasets produced by massive online experiments. Sharing of these datasets will support the development of new theories and models of behavior and broaden the impact of social science research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.