**Deliberative Lives: A Open Research Project by the [Busara Center for Behavioral Economics][1]** This page is the home of the Deliberative Lives Project by the Behavior and Policy Lab at Princeton University and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi, Kenya and Princeton, NJ. The goal of the project is to understand how people think and make decisions. Research questions include: what kinds of things do people think about at a given moment? What kinds of decisions do they make? What are their greatest sources of joy, what are their greatest sources of worry? What are external and internal (e.g. psychological) constraints to decision-making? How far into the future do people think, and about what? We will use in-person and phone surveys of a large number of individual respondents to answer these questions. We are particularly interested in comparing the deliberative lives of poor and rich people; for this reason, the project will survey rich and poor respondents in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as rich and poor respondents in Trenton, NJ. In both cases the surveys will be administered by the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics (www.busaracenter.org). The project is coordinated by Rafael Batista, Jeremy Shapiro, and Johannes Haushofer, who are affiliated with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and the Behavior and Policy Lab at Princeton University. But importantly, this project is also run by anyone who is interested in contributing to it: the project is an experiment in itself in that it is completely open. We are passionate about making science accessible and transparent, and will use this project as a test case. The project therefore has the following features: 1. **Communication is in the open.** In traditional research projects, the evolution of the project is usually only known to a small group of researchers, which makes the process opaque to the public and creates the risk of data-mining and cherry-picking. In this project, we strive for more openness and accountability. Through the Open Science Framework, we intend on making nearly every aspect of this project open to the public – all planning, discussion, design, grant proposals, raw data, analyses code, etc. The goal of this approach is to make the project accountable and give observers a glimpse behind the scenes of social science.* 2. **All stages of the project are open to input from the general public.** In traditional research projects, feedback often gets collected late in the process, i.e. during seminar presentations and submission to journals, and often only from a select audience. A central goal of this project is to get feedback from anyone who is willing to give it, and to collect it during all stages of the project. We will therefore share questionnaires and analysis ideas on this page, and welcome all suggestions for how to improve them. The goal is to develop the questions we ask, and the analyses we conduct, based on this input. We may not take everyone’s advice, but we will listen to it. 3. **The data is publicly available from day 1 and can be analyzed by anyone.** This is maybe the most significant innovation of the Deliberative Lives Project. In traditional research projects, data often does not get shared at all, or only gets shared after publication, which is sometimes years after the first presentations are given or a working paper is published. This has two consequences: first, results that do not stand up to scrutiny and re-analysis may nevertheless become gospel because they go unchallenged for a long time; second, good ideas for analyses may go unheard for a long time. This project therefore makes all data publicly available (in anonymized form) from Day 1. Data will be posted on this page immediately after it is collected, and can be downloaded and analyzed by anyone. The data may not be used for commercial purposes, and cannot be used alone or in conjunction with other datasets to obtain information identifying any individual participant. Any analyses of the data may not be submitted to journals for publication until the first paper is published by the Busara team. However, analyses and results can be shared freely on blogs and on this page. We hope that this process will generate interesting new ways of understanding the deliberative lives of people in Kenya and the US. 4. **The paper is open for comments before submission.** At the end of the project the core research team will write a scientific paper on the main findings of the study. Two drafts of this paper will be made public on this page before submission, and everybody is invited to comment and make suggestions for improvements. After publication of this first paper, others may use the data freely to submit and publish their own scientific papers. **In order to ensure privacy and anonymity of subjects and employees within Busara we reserve the right strip raw data of potential unique identifiers and withhold certain information regarding employees’ salaries.* [1]: http://www.busaracenter.org/