Charlotte Vaughn
Charlotte Vaughn is Assistant Research Professor in the Language Science Center at University of Maryland, where she studies sociolinguistic processing. She runs the Language Science Station, a pop-up research lab at Planet Word museum in Washington DC.
University of Maryland
@LangSciStation (BlueSky) & @Charlotte Vaughn and @The Language Science Station (LinkedIn)
Session
Psychologists rely on human subjects–members of the public–to generate data. This contact with the public is a missed opportunity for engagement with the public about our field. Following the Research as Engagement Model (Vaughn, 2026, JEP:Gen), this workshop encourages attendees to view participants as meaningful opportunities for intentional engagement, rather than merely as datapoints.
This workshop situates the post-experiment debriefing as a primary site for public engagement: a place to spark curiosity around human behavior. Debriefings are often an afterthought of the experiment design process, and in their current form their impact is limited. After introducing attendees to the potential benefits of debriefings for public engagement, the workshop gives researchers tools for designing impactful and innovative debriefings for their own studies. It provides guidance for refining the content and form of debriefings, and offers attendees space to brainstorm ideas for their own debriefings with peer feedback.