After receiving my PhD in social psychology in 2010 I have worked at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. My research focuses on how to design and interpret studies, applied (meta)-statistics, and reward structures in science, for which I received the Ammodo Science award for fundamental research in 2023. I love to teach, especially about research methods to young scholars (and received the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal prize for Open Social Science as a Leader in Education). You can follow my (free) first Coursera course here and my second (free) Coursera course here. I've written an accompanying (free) textbook, which you can read here. Together with Smriti Mehta I co-host the podcast Nullius in Verba on what science is, and what it could be. You can listen to episodes in the podcast player in the sidebar. 

If you would like me to review for your journal, know that I prioritize review requests based on how much the articles adhere to Open Science principles. I offer free consulting (up to 2 hours a week) if your psychological research has the end-goal to improve animal welfare (email me to see if there is anything I can help with). It would be great if science could be a much more collaborative enterprise (see my TEDx talk on this topic here). I was funded by a VIDI grant from NWO from 2017-2022 on a project that aimed to improve the reliability and efficiency of psychological science. I'm the Chair of the TU/e Ethical Review Board. I'm currently coordinating the collaborative project "The Power of One: Towards the Representation of Unheard and Unseen Individuals in the Hospital, Workplace and Neighbourhood" funded by the Centre for Unusual Collaboration.  

You can access my CV here, Publons reviewer profile here, Google Scholar profile here, my pre-prints here, and my GitHub account here. My Erdös number is 4. 

Statistics and Methodology

My blog on methods and statistics can be found here, and I regularly teach workshops on methods and statistics to scientists, science journalists (e.g., Persgroep, NOS), and at companies (e.g., Booking.com, Trivago, Alliander). In the last few years I've developed an interest in ways to improve how we interpret and design studies. We can try a little harder to make science as open and robust as possible, and give the tax payer as much value for money as we can. I have written practical primers on sample size justification, effect sizes, sequential analysis, and equivalence tests, I'm considered indirectly useful by Nassim Taleb ;).

Empirical Research

I've examined how people can use concrete information (e.g., spatial distance, brightness differences) to structure their thoughts about more abstract things (e.g., valence, power, time), and how to improve the empirical and theoretical grounding of social embodiment. In other studies I have investigated how groups emerge from individuals through movement synchronization. Further interests include the meaning of colors, such as the relation between the valence and brightness of affective pictures, and conceptual similarity.


The cover image is Wall Drawing #1136 by Sol LeWitt



Contact: 

Dr. Daniël Lakens

Eindhoven University of Technology

ATLAS 9.402

Postbus 513, 5600 MB EINDHOVEN

D.Lakens@tue.nl

Phone: 040-2474581