Generating Experimental Text Stimuli for Psychological Research Using ChatGPT

Abstract

The introduction of ChatGPT—an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot capable of text recognition and generation—has been transformative for numerous academic research communities, including psychology. We propose using ChatGPT to reduce researchers’ cognitive load and time spent creating text materials for psychological studies (e.g., vignettes). We present examples of ChatGPT-generated text materials for relationship-science ( N = 60) and social-cognition ( N = 67) studies and provide evidence of their effectiveness. Furthermore, we discuss ethical considerations and make recommendations related to using text materials generated by ChatGPT or similar AI tools. We end with a brief discussion of the importance of this work and encourage others to leverage AI in the field of psychology.