Professor of Psychology
Haverford College
Ben is a social psychologist whose research focuses on interpersonal relationships. He has published on the topics of commitment in close relationships, social cognition, breakup, emotions, social networks, geographic separation, social media, and research methodology. A second line of research examines commitment in non-romantic contexts, and his current work includes a collaborative longitudinal study of identity development among young adults. Ben has been a member of the Department of Psychology at Haverford College since 2001, where he has teachescourses on social psychology, close relationships, environmental psychology, science writing, and research methods/statistics.
Ben earned a B.A. in Psychology at Grinnell College, and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Psychology at Purdue University.
AS A TIER FELLOW... In his own lab and in the work of the students he supervises, Ben plans to develop and implement standards of transparency over the entire arc of a research project: pre-registering hypotheses; archiving research materials and a codebook for the original dataset; recording all steps of data cleaning required to transform original data to the final analysis dataset; save annotated syntax files that execute all reported analyses; and store drafts and final versions of research papers. The Open Science Framework (OSF)will be a critical tool for implementing all these practices. Ben believes these experiences will serve as a "proof of concept" that will encourage other social psychologists to develop and/or adopt similar practices in their classes and labs. During his fellowship year, Ben co-authored with Kevin McIntyre (Trinity University/Open Stats Lab) the OSL/PT Preregistration Template, targeted at researchers at all stages of their career, including students. Ben also created the Open Science Manual, designed to assist his senior thesis students in conducting research transparently and reproducibly in his laboratory.