Who are you, and what do you do?
I am a senior lecturer and the head of the marketing program at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Bar-Ilan University. I study human judgment and decision-making process, mainly focusing on those that relate to consumers’ behavior. I am also interested in moral judgments and unethical behavior (and the paper I linked relates to that) and in privacy-related issues such as online social networks and self-disclosure. In addition, I like exploring and utilizing crowdsourcing solutions to behavioral research (mainly Amazon Mechanical Turk) and to study the methodological issues such type of research involve. I live in Herzeliya, Israel, with my wife and two kids (ages 5 and 2) and I enjoy playing volleyball in my spare time.
What do you consider your most important research tool(s) on your computer?
Not really on my computer, but actually on the Internet, I do almost all of my research by combining Amazon Mechanical Turk (to recruit participants) and Qualtrics (to program and administer experiments). I have found that, if done carefully and correctly, this combination has the power to enable me to explore various topics in judgment and decision-making, and to reach a far more diverse and interesting population than I could have reached had I only sampled undergrads. Because I’m an experimentalist in nature, I try to take full advantage of Qualtrics’ randomization and advanced logic capabilities. I have found these capabilities to be very extensive and have yet to encounter a case in which I couldn’t program my experiment using these solutions. I use SPSS for most of my data analyses (but I would like to learn R soon), which I sometime complement by using online resources for power analyses etc. (my favorite is Russ Lenth’s app at http://homepage.stat.uiowa.edu/~rlenth/Power/index.html)
What do you consider your most important research tool(s) outside of your computer?
Douglas Adams once said “Outside a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read…” So, outside my computer, I don’t really have other research tools. However, I think my most helpful resource outside my computer is my wife. Whenever I have a new research idea or experiment, I describe it to her and by judging her reaction I know if I’m on to something interesting or not.
What is your favorite tip for getting writing done?
Writing is something I love to do but sometimes it happens in different processes. There are times when I prefer to write almost all of the paper before I have all my results. The advantage of this process is that it gives me clarity about what I’m trying to study and usually improves my studies. However, there are other times when I feel that can’t be done (or if I’m just too lazy). In these cases, I actually hold off on the writing until all of my studies and experiments are done, and sometimes sit down to write only after I presented the research a few times. However, even in those cases I always write a brief method+results summary every time I finish a study. It helps me understand the findings, and it also saves a lot of time when you get to start writing the paper.
Eyal’s favorite paper: