CLA Advances Behavioral Social Science Research

To do its part in supporting the U’s push to become one of the top three public research universities in the world, CLA recently has made investments to advance leading-edge research in the behavioral social sciences.

This past January, the Social and Behavioral Science lab opened its doors. It provides space, resources, programming and technical support to facilitate research in the behavioral social sciences. The networked computer lab can accommodate over 40 subjects and can be configured to run different and simultaneous experiments. It includes an eye tracker lab, which can be used to observe and record eye movement on computer screen displays.

Faculty and students in economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, statistics, and speech-language-hearing sciences will benefit from the new facility. It will also be available to social scientists in other U of M colleges.

Before the lab opened, some departments had only limited facilities or had no choice but to use costly third parties for large-scale surveys.

Ben Munson, associate professor in the speech-language-hearing sciences department, found the lab to be a great resource for a recent study he conducted. Munson tested 78 people on how stereotypes influenced how they perceived speech sounds. Each person underwent tests that lasted over an hour. In Munson’s own lab where only one subject can be tested at a time, the data collection process would have taken place over many days. With the new facility, the data could be collected in 5 sessions.

With this crossroad of research available, it’s hoped that the lab can serve as the center of gravity for many research projects, fostering collaboration and synergy across disciplines.