Ivan Flis

Quantitative methodologies in 20th century psychology

During the 20th century, scientific psychology experienced an explosive growth in the number of practitioners, scientists, university departments, journals, and papers. I am interested in how this disciplinary success can be associated with the adoption of a specific set of quantitative methodologies, statistical techniques, and associated philosophical commitments; in particular frequentist significance testing, construct validity theories, and aggregate descriptive statistics. Some of the questions I am interested in are: What are the philosophical commitments of such methodological standardization? How did psychological theories develop under such a methodological regime, especially in times of change like the cognitive revolution? What is the social context of the institutions of these methods, especially considering the dominance of the North American psychology?

Replication crisis and Open Science

Since the 2010’s, psychology and the biomedical sciences in particular, have been going through the so-called replication crisis. As a response, a grassroots reform movement has developed which is trying to apply Open Science innovations in order to resolve problems with replicability, transparency, bias, and fraud. Here, I am interested in the history of the related Open Science and psychology’s reform movement, especially how it can be informed and critiqued by work in history of psychology and history and philosophy of science.

2022 - present

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia

2019 - 2022

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb

2019

AS-SEE Research Fellow at the University of Rijeka, Croatia // Moore Institute Visiting Fellow at NUI Galway J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, Ireland

2014 – 2018

PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, Descartes Centre, Utrecht University, Netherlands

2007-2013

BA and MA in Psychology, Centre for Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb, Croatia

I was an Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS; https://jeps.efpsa.org/), Editor of the JEPS Bulletin (https://blog.efpsa.org/), and an Editor of the history of science blog Shells and Pebbles (https://www.shellsandpebbles.com/).

I am currently supervising 3 Masters students.