Psychology looks to physics to solve replication crisis

Brian Nosek explains the potential for accelerating collaboration in psychological science

Published at Nature Index, January 2020

In the summer of 1998, a group of psychologists left their labs at Yale University and headed to the beach. They pitched a tent and began running experiments.

Among them was Brian Nosek, a graduate student interested in the subconscious biases that affect our social interactions. The effects he was looking for are subtle. For the signal to cut through the noise, he needed thousands of research participants — far more than he could feasibly test on his own.

His fellow students and postdocs were facing a similar predicament, so they decided to consolidate their efforts. Together, they would run up to 300 beach-goers a day through their experiments, handing out lottery tickets and sodas as rewards.

“It was fun,” Nosek recalls. “We got great tans.”

While the findings of his experiments were never published, for Nosek, now a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, it was his first taste of team science and a lesson in the power of collaboration.

Traditionally, psychology researchers have worked individually or in small groups, often within the same lab. Most papers in the field’s top journals have five or fewer authors.

But as psychologists have begun to grapple with concerns about the reliability and validity of many of their key findings, the need for broader collaboration has become increasingly urgent.

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