Radically open science: Using discursive and rhetorical psychology to explore experimentation in action

The Open Science (OS) movement gained traction in the last decade due to concerns about the reproducibility of experimental results, particularly in the field of social psychology. However, the actual conduct of these experiments is often overlooked in discussions about OS. There is extensive literature on the generation of scientific findings involving social processes based on discursive practices. Moreover, previous research from a conversation-analytic and discursive perspective has demonstrated that experiments are fundamentally interactional in nature (Edmonds & Greiffenhagen, 2020; Gibson, 2020; Wooffitt & Allistone, 2005). This study examined the way in which a cognitive psychology experiment unfolds based on interactions between the experimenter and the participants. Data were derived from audio recordings of sessions from an independent language-learning experimental study conducted in a psychology laboratory. The participants were given the task of learning new words associated with pictures and were later asked to recall those words. The focus of the analysis was on the interactions that occurred during the set-up phase, a mid-experiment break, and the debrief. Informed by Discursive and Rhetorical Psychology, analysis revealed that social contingencies and interactional intricacies played a role in the conduct of the experiment. The results contribute to the OS movement by highlighting the value of supplementing existing OS practices with interactional analyses of experimentation-in-action.