2026-05-07 –, Track 1
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.
This approach has the potential to reach thousands of members of the public per year, engaging them more deeply with psychological science. This is especially important for research both for and about minoritized populations.
Please note any pre-requisite knowledge/expertise you will expect from attendees (i.e., is the session most appropriate for someone who already has experience with a topic?).:No prior experience is needed.
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.