The core team of the Psychological Methods Lab consists of Associate Professor Dora Matzke and Professors Denny Borsboom, Han van der Maas, and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. Together, they received the Ammodo Science Award for groundbreaking research, honouring internationally recognised, high quality and potentially groundbreaking research carried out in collaboration by a team of outstanding researchers. The award of 800,000 euros can be used by the teams to explore new research areas over the coming years.

'We are honored with the Ammodo Science Award,' says Wagenmakers. 'This is a wonderful recognition for the field of psychological methodology at the University of Amsterdam, allowing us to provide an additional boost to an important research line that, until recently, we could only pursue as a scientific hobby. We believe that the methods we are going to develop can significantly improve the quality of data analysis, not only in psychology but for empirical sciences in general.'

Going beyond model myopia in psychology

The Psychological Methods Lab is committed to avoiding ‘model myopia’ in psychology, or the idea that only one correct interpretation of research data is possible. Instead, they emphasise the power of diverse models and argue that methodological diversity is crucial for reliable science. The team develops robust statistics to gain more accurate insights from psychological datasets. One example is their novel network approach to psychological disorders, in which symptoms and causes are viewed as a complex system of interactions between variables. The team shares their innovative models worldwide via JASP, their self-developed and widely used open-source statistical software package.

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