Getting started

Welcome to Deliberate Lab! To get started, you should have a website link to the platform. If you’re using the Google-hosted platform, go here.

🎥 View video tutorials for getting started

If you’re setting up your own deployment of the platform, see the Developers section in the sidebar.

Overview

A quick overview of concepts/terms referenced across the platform and this documentation

In Deliberation Lab, experimenters (people who can view/edit experiments on the platform) can create experiments, which include a list of experiment stages (or stages). Each stage can be configured to include custom content and options; the experiment also has some top-level settings (e.g., Prolific integration).

To run an experiment, experimenters can create cohorts, which is a bundle of participants who can interact with each other during the experiment.

Example: if running an experiment where two people play chess with each other, you might create 10 cohorts and have 2 participants in each cohort. All data can be downloaded together at the experiment (top) level.

Finally, participants can be manually added to cohorts (via experimenter dashboard), or they can dynamically join from a cohort landing page. Experimenters have the ability to transfer participants to different cohorts (within the same experimenter) or “boot” (kick out) participants from the cohort/experiment. (Additional participant management options are covered later in this tutorial.)

Logging in

Navigate to your provided website link and use the “Experimenter login” button to log in via Google account.

If you’re using the Google-hosted platform, go here.

Anyone with a Google account can “log in” to the platform, but researchers must be on an “allowlist” (managed in Firebase datastore) to view, create, and manage experiments.

If you receive a 403: Participants do not have access error, you have not been added to the allowlist and should contact the person hosting the platform (at the website link you were provided).

Once you’re logged in, you should be able to see a home page with both your experiments and any shared public experiments.

Tip: If you plan to set up LLM mediators, add relevant API keys (e.g., Gemini API key) on the Settings page now. Your key must be present in order to effectively run LLM agents during experiments. We store it in a Firebase document that only you (and the backend function making the LLM calls for your experiment) can access.

Next steps

Once you have access to the platform, you can start creating and running your experiments!