How can technologies help disclose new insights into collective behaviors?

Technologies increasingly shape our lives but also how research is done. Nowadays, we can use complex technological tools to examine unexplored research territories. In this regard, we focus in this work on collective experiments involving direct social interactions without systematic intermediaries. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we remark on the importance of studying collective processes, which are still scarcely considered in the existing experimental literature in economics, and the multimodal use of technological tools to study those processes in a controlled environment. Second, we bring a greater focus on the tools themselves, their characteristics, and their wearability. With this, we highlight the importance of the collaboration of economics in multidisciplinary projects, e.g., with psychology or engineering. We also highlight the potential of collective experiments and the importance of integrating technologies into the experimental methodology, at the same time acknowledging the existing barriers and limitations in studying such complex phenomena.