I am an assistant professor at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University. My research focuses on the intersection between high-level cognition (e.g., religious beliefs, morality), low-level mechanisms (cognitive or neural processing) and methodological advancements. My work typically involves answering substantive questions in the field of social and cognitive psychology using innovative tools such as Bayesian hierarchical modeling, a many-analysts approach, analysis blinding, or multiverse analysis. Examples of such substantive questions are: do religious symbols make people seem more trustworthy? Does nonsense from a scientist sound better than nonsense from a spiritual guru? Do anger displays promote status in men while harming status in women?

Bayesian Inference

Across all my research, I apply Bayesian statistics. Specifically, I have used Bayesian hierarchical modeling, a flexible and powerful method to maximize the informativeness of the data yet constrain inference based on structural features (e.g., people nested in countries, trials nested in people), as well as theoretical predictions (e.g., all countries should show an effect in the same direction).

During my postdoc, I also worked on further developing these Bayesian hierarchical models for joint modeling of behavioral (e.g., accuracy, response times) and neural data (e.g., fMRI, EEG). In this project, we aimed to provide (1) guidelines for the necessary number of trials and subjects in cognitive tasks given the signal-to-noise ratio and (2) a collection of openly accessible joint modeling pipelines combining behavioral and neural data to optimize this signal-to-noise ratio.

Team Science

I am a big fan of team science projects, in which researchers from different theoretical and cultural backgrounds work collaboratively. I’ve lead several cross-cultural collaborative projects, as well as worked on methods to promote and enhance team science, such as Bayesian informed multiverse analysis for many-labs style projects, a systematic way to evaluate evidence in multi-analysts studies subjectively, or a several-analysts approach to assess analytic variability in a targeted, feasible manner.

Open Science

A large part of my PhD focused on promoting open science practices within the field of the psychology of religion. Furthermore, together with Alexandra Sarafoglou, I founded the Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA). As OSCA, we organized lectures, journal club meetings, and workshops and provided guidance for researchers interested in applying open science practices in their own work. In my own work, I always try to provide open data & code and publish preprints of my manuscripts.

Skepsis

Currently, I’m also involved as a board member of the Stichting Skepsis, a Dutch organization dedicated to the promotion and practice of scientific skepticism.