Pulse for Social Science (PS2)

U.S. national security interests increasingly rely on strategies and tactics that require a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior across the full range of contexts and cultures found across the globe. Unfortunately, the behavioral and social sciences are not well poised to produce research capable of advancing our understanding at a global level.This research is often limited by laboratory-based experiments with easy-to-access community samples, survey studies with limited experimental manipulations for hypothesis testing, or complex models that lack enough data to be accurate. To address these challenges, we propose a direct to Phase II Award to extend our existing Pulse platform for surveying remote populations to create Pulse for Social Science (PS2).Building on our proven ability to open novel data streams from diverse sources, we seek to develop new extensions and applications to enable researchers to access large particpant samples around the world (including remote areas and conflict zones), to present experimental stimuli and collect behavioral data in sufficient volume to support diverse modeling. PS2 seeks to revolutionize social science by combining innovative participant engagement with cutting edge social data collection into a platform to generate data at scales sufficient to support robust experimentation and modeling.