Social Science Collaboratory
Many of the most exciting scientific accomplishments of the past few decades – such as mapping the human genome or developing transformative AI technologies – have required researchers to do something unusual: collaborate on a massive scale. Our group specializes in developing, supporting, and studying such initiatives.
Studying big team science
Big team science endeavors represent the largest and most ambitious investments of social capital in science. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of their prevalence, impact, and drawbacks. We study the rise, impact, and drawbacks of such initiatives comprehensively by tracking millions of scientific teams throughout the history of science. For example, in an analysis of over 3 million psychology papers, we found the largest teams tend to generate the largest amount of impact, in terms of attention in science, the news, social media, and policy documents. Currently, we are leveraging these tools to examine ways that scientists have most effectively responded to urgent societal developments, such as (a) sudden threats to national security, (b) global pandemics, and (c) the sudden public release and uptake of disruptive AI technologies.
Figure 1. In psychology, research by larger teams receives more mentions in scholarly articles, news, and public policy.
Building big team science
A second strand of our work focuses on building big team science initiatives that tackle questions we find meaningful. For example, we built:
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The Many Smiles Collaboration: an adversarial collaboration (49 researchers across 19 countries) focused on addressing long-standing theoretical debates about whether posing smiles can make people feel happier.
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The Global Gratitude Collaboration: a global collaboration (36 researchers across 34 countries) focused on comprehensively evaluating the effects of gratitude interventions on subjective well-being.
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The Emotion Physiology and Experience Collaboration: a machine learning competition (51 researchers across 11 countries) focused on comprehensively benchmarking promises and limitations of leveraging machine learning to predict emotion from physiology.
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Figure 2. The Global Gratitude Collaboration collected data from 10,772 participants in 34 countries that covered a broad set of cross-cultural differences.
Supporting big team science
A third strand of our work focuses on supporting collaboration in science . For example, we published one of the first guides to big team science, with additional papers dedicated to issues with authorship and disagreements in team science. We use insights like these to advise and support other big team science initiatives, including:
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The Psychological Science Accelerator: a decentralized community of ≈ 2500 researchers in 50+ countries who pool resources to complete large studies in psychology.
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The Virtual Experience Research Accelerator: an ongoing initiative to create a shared participant recruitment platform for researchers focused on augmented and virtual reality.
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The Global Happiness MegaStudy: a still budding initiative that seeks to leverage large-scale global data collection to comprehensively identify the most effective ways that researchers can improve human happiness.