Dr Lukas Wallrich

Dr Lukas Wallrich

Senior Lecturer

Birkbeck, University of London

I work as a Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck Business School, University of London. There, I teach on organisational psychology master programmes and research how workforce diversity can be harnessed to improve organisational performance, and how we can improve the reliability of research. This includes co-leading FORRT’s Replication Hub, acting as a Senior Editor for Replication Research, and leading the UKRI-funded project Making Replications Count. In addition, I am interested in intergroup contact research, and serve as Co-Chair of the International Contact Research Network.

I am also very interested in Open Science and an avid R user. In that space, I enjoy contributing to the development of tools that support open research - for instance, the CiteSource package that supports meta-analyses. I have also authored three R packages, rsprite2, timesaveR and metaUI.

In 2021, I completed my PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. In that research, I focused on the relationships between intergroup contact and diversity beliefs. During that time, I was a member of the Equalab and DIPlab research groups.

Download my CV.

Interests
  • Diversity beliefs, intergroup contact & organisational performance
  • Prejudice reduction & pro-social action
  • Natural language processing & Big Data analytics
  • Innovative educational practices, incl. flipped classroom and open teaching materials
  • Open Science, replicability & meta-research
Education

  • PhD in Social Psychology, 2021

    Goldsmiths, University of London

  • MA in Education (Psychology), 2017

    UCL Institute of Education

  • BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE), 2012

    University of Oxford (Merton)

Experience

(selected)

 
 
 
 
 
Lecturer in Organisational Psychology
Birkbeck, University of London
Jul 2021 – Present London, UK
Research into how organisations can benefit from workforce diversity & teaching on various organisational psychology master programmes.
 
 
 
 
 
Associate Lecturer
St Mary’s University Twickenham
Oct 2019 – Apr 2021 Twickenham, UK
Taught various subjects, primarily social psychology and political psychology.
 
 
 
 
 
PhD Candidate & Associate Lecturer
Goldsmiths, University of London
Oct 2017 – May 2021 London, UK
Taught quantitative research methods at graduate level and undergraduate psychology tutorials.
 
 
 
 
 
Management Consultant
McKinsey & Company
Jan 2013 – Apr 2016 Berlin, Germany
Worked on consulting projects for a variety of private and public sector clients, with a particular focus on leadership development and other areas of organisational psychology.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

How does diversity impact team performance - podcast interview
In our large-scale meta-analysis on the links between team diversity and team performance, we found that the overall relationships are …
14 August 2024 1:00 PM
How does diversity impact team performance - podcast interview
Benefiting from diversity - using agent-based models to understand possibilities and barriers
Seminar presentation that introduces how cognitive diversity might benefit team performance, what agent-based models are and how the latter might help to understand the former better.
29 June 2022 Birkbeck, University of London
Slides Video
Benefiting from diversity - using agent-based models to understand possibilities and barriers
Widely prevalent, unevenly declining: implicit and explicit bias in the US since 2006
Conference presentation on how explicit and implicit biases have changed in the US from 2006 to 2020.
18 February 2022 Virtual
Slides Video
Widely prevalent, unevenly declining: implicit and explicit bias in the US since 2006
Valuing diversity: an undervalued outcome of intergroup contact
Conference presentation on how intergroup contact shapes the valuing of diversity and why this matters.
13 December 2020 Virtual
Video
Valuing diversity: an undervalued outcome of intergroup contact
When anti-refugee violence backfires
Conference presentation on the link between attitudes towards refugees and episodes of anti-refugee violence at the local level.
14 July 2020 Virtual
Video
When anti-refugee violence backfires

Recent Publications

Bestiary of Questionable Research Practices in Psychology
We defined, collected, and categorized 40 questionable research practices (QRPs) in quantitative psychology through an iterative, community-consensus process informed by existing literature. By clarifying definitions and documenting potential harms, detectability, clues, and preventive measures for each QRP, we provide a foundation for improving research integrity, transparency, and the reliability of scientific findings.
Cite DOI
Bestiary of Questionable Research Practices in Psychology
The Replication Database: Documenting the Replicability of Psychological Science
The replicability of psychological science has been widely discussed since the Reproducibility Project back in 2015. This paper introduces the Replication Database, a platform that hosts 1,239 original findings paired with replication findings. In addition to supporting research on replicability in general, this dynamic database is intended to make it easier to find replications of specific studies, and thus base teaching and research on more robust evidence.
Preprint PDF Cite Dataset DOI
The Replication Database: Documenting the Replicability of Psychological Science
The Relationship Between Team Diversity and Team Performance: Reconciling Promise and Reality Through a Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Registered Report
As diversity is becoming increasingly important to organizations, there has been a wealth of research on its relationship to team performance. In this meta-analysis, we synthesize 615 reports (with 2,638 effect sizes) to estimate these relationships, and to test whether their size is substantively meaningful.
Preprint Cite Code Dataset Project Source Document DOI
The Relationship Between Team Diversity and Team Performance: Reconciling Promise and Reality Through a Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Registered Report
Groups of diverse problem-solvers outperform groups of highest-ability problem-solvers - most of the time
Agent-based models can be a useful tool to simulate (and thus understand) dynamics that might emerge in the real world. In that vein, Hong & Page (2004) modeled how diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. Here, I replicate their model with open code and show that recent criticisms - while valid - leave the overall claim intact.
PDF Cite Code DOI
Groups of diverse problem-solvers outperform groups of highest-ability problem-solvers - most of the time
Making diversity work: transforming assessment and selection to hire for culture-add, not culture-fit
Beyond moral considerations, organisations often hope that increases in diversity can deliver greater team performance. This commentary argues that selection and assessment needs to change fundamentally to realise the potential benefits of diversity. The idea of hiring for culture-add rather than culture-fit can guide this transformation.
PDF Cite
Making diversity work: transforming assessment and selection to hire for culture-add, not culture-fit
Adolescents challenging discrimination: The benefits of a perspective-taking and action-planning intervention on self-efficacy
Discrimination is widespread and often goes unchallenged because bystanders do not recognize the need to intervene or do not know how to intervene. This field experiment with adolescents (N = 639) tested a group discussion designed to increase perceived importance and self-efficacy around challenging general discrimination. The intervention, which involved perspective-taking and action-planning, was tested with delayed measures against active control conditions, namely sessions on self-disclosure and civic engagement. It led to greater self-efficacy, particularly among White participants.
PDF Cite Code Slides
Adolescents challenging discrimination: The benefits of a perspective-taking and action-planning intervention on self-efficacy
Civic understanding mediates of the effect of educational tracks on voting intentions in German schools
Secondary education in Germany is strongly divided into distinct tracks that either aim for university entry or for vocational training. Allocation to these tracks predicts a wide range of life outcomes. In this paper, we combine survey and interview results to explore why voting intentions are strongly shaped by attendance of either educational track.
PDF Cite DOI
Civic understanding mediates of the effect of educational tracks on voting intentions in German schools
Valuing diversity: An undervalued mediator of intergroup contact
This article reports two studies that suggest that intergroup contact is associated with a greater valuing of diversity, and then in turn with positive intergroup attitudes and intentions.
PDF Cite Code Dataset Poster DOI
Valuing diversity: An undervalued mediator of intergroup contact
Painting all foreigners with one brush
Surveys often ask respondents to report their attitudes towards “foreigners.” In this paper, we explore who German respondents typically think of and why this matters for the interpretation of survey results.
PDF Cite Code DOI
Painting all foreigners with one brush

Recent Blog Posts

Small Telescopes for Higher-Power Replications
TL;DR. In Simonsohn’s Small‑Telescopes framework you test whether the true effect is smaller than the effect that would have given the original study 33% power (call this \(d_{33\%}\)). Simonsohn (2015) shows that this requires 2.
Last updated on 9 August 2025
Assessing interrater agreement in meta-analyses - what sample size do I need?
Work in Progress: This post is a draft and currently under review. Feedback is highly welcome. Please double-check the details before relying on them for decision-making. The problem Researchers conducting meta-analyses and systematic reviews need to decide whether to use one or multiple researchers at both the screening and coding stages.
Last updated on 11 May 2023 statistics
Assessing interrater agreement in meta-analyses - what sample size do I need?
Quickly expand your capacity: run Python script on Google Cloud
I am currently working on some simulation studies using agent-based models, which can quickly take a very long time to run. Rather than having my system slowed for hours/days, I wanted to find a way to quickly send code into the cloud.
25 October 2021 coding
Quickly expand your capacity: run Python script on Google Cloud