As psychology’s prominence continues to grow, researchers are collaborating more both within the field and across disciplines. These collaborations can help psychologists reach a wider audience, have a bigger impact, and ultimately improve the work that’s being done.
But collaborations come with complications, such as managing team dynamics, communicating effectively, determining authorship, working across time zones, combining funding, and more. To make collaborations successful, researchers say communication and transparency are key.
Jay Van Bavel, PhD, a social psychologist at New York University, and Claire Robertson, a doctoral student in his lab, had an accidental success story of an interdisciplinary, international collaboration that highlighted what makes collaborations work. They had set out to study the effect of negative headlines on online news consumption. But after submitting their findings to the journal Nature Human Behaviour, they were shocked to receive an email from the journal that another set of researchers had submitted identical findings, using the same data set, within days of Van Bavel and Robertson’s submission.
To deal with this unusual situation, the journal editors asked both research teams if they’d be willing to jointly submit a manuscript. Van Bavel and Robertson agreed and found themselves unexpectedly collaborating with a team of computer scientists from Germany and Switzerland for the next 20 months.
The teams managed to mesh, with both sides genuinely excited about what the other could offer, ultimately publishing their paper in March (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 7, 2023opens in new window).
“It ended up being a really great collaboration,” Robertson said. “In the end, it made the paper 10 times stronger.”
Most people won’t form a partnership this way. But what made their cooperation work is common among successful research teams: communication, compromise, and enthusiasm for each other’s contributions.
Launching a collaboration
Collaborations, especially across disciplines or national boundaries, can be stressful, said Kim Gorgens, PhD, a rehabilitation psychologist at the University of Denver who is involved in several multidisciplinary projects with other researchers and community organizations in Colorado. “But the payout is so worth it,” Gorgens said. “The chance to reach another audience or to think about your results in a way that is informed by another lens is a way to stay more relevant as a psychologist.”
Some collaborations arise naturally out of networking at conferences or on academic listservs; in other cases, researchers go looking for them. Social media can be one place to connect: Researchers have found collaborators through Twitter and through blog posts. Combing through the scientific literature on a particular topic is another common method. “I’m a cold-caller,” Gorgens said.
Often, potential collaborations simmer for years before they come to fruition. Julie McCarthy, PhD, a psychologist at Mass General Brigham McLean, is an early career investigator midway through a National Institute on Drug Abuse K23 career development grant. McCarthy is part of active collaborations and is also working on building a network through trainings, workshops, and other one-off activities to lay the foundation for future ones.
“Some of the advice I’ve gotten is that it’s really important that you like and trust the people you’re working with,” she said. “It’s a nice way to test the waters with respect to the type of work people are doing, how they think about these research and clinical issues, and whether they are excited about the same things that you are.”
When first working with someone, it’s important to make sure you’re on the same page. One way to do that is to develop what Howard Gadlin, PhD, a psychologist and retired ombuds for the National Institutes of Health, calls a “scientific prenup.” By laying out basic parameters about authorship, data handling, decision-making processes, and goals, researchers can avoid conflict in the long run, Gadlin said.
“When some people first hear about this idea, their reaction is, ‘If I ask people to have a prenup, they will think I don’t trust them,’” he said. “But the prenup is exactly the basis for establishing trust, because you detail your expectations of one another and divide up roles and responsibilities.”
Common sticking points often emerge around credit and authorship, Gadlin said. In the case of Robertson and Van Bavel, figuring out how to handle who would be first author and senior author was one of the foremost orders of business, especially given the importance of first-author publications for graduate students like Robertson. (The team settled on joint first authorship for Robertson and her German counterpart.)
Examples and templates for collaboration agreements are available at multiple organizations, including the Psychological Science Acceleratoropens in new window and ManyBabiesopens in new window, an open science consortium for infant research. “Transparency and clarity are the two big things we try to live by,” said Heidi Baumgartner, PhD, a developmental psychologist at Stanford University, the codirector of the Stanford Big Team Science Lab, and the executive director of ManyBabies. “Whatever the expectations are, just write them down and make that available to everyone.”
Navigating compromise and cooperation
One of the big challenges in multidisciplinary collaborations is talking across fields—and adjusting to the norms of a different discipline. Diversity of educational background and experience positively influences team creativity, said Roni Reiter-Palmon, PhD, an industrial-organizational psychologist at the University of Nebraska Omaha who collaborates with researchers from medical science and engineering. Her collaborators read different journals, attend different conferences, and use different analysis methods. “They bring a wealth of information that I would not normally see, and I bring to them information that they would not normally see,” she said.
Finding a shared vocabulary is key to mining these various perspectives. Different fields may use terminology in different ways, so it’s important to be clear about definitions, Reiter-Palmon said. It is also important to step outside the norms of psychology to understand the goals and needs of other fields. For example, does an article in a psychology journal benefit a computer scientist when it comes time for them to apply for tenure? Is everyone growing professionally from their role on the team? Is there a way to design goals that will work for everyone? Is the team prioritizing voices of early-career researchers and researchers from marginalized backgrounds, who might lack the status of more established or White scientists? Is there input from community partners? Psychologists’ expertise in issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion often makes them a good point person for navigating these questions, Gorgens said.
And then there are the practicalities: How will your team schedule meetings, jointly edit manuscripts, and share data? These issues become particularly important for international collaborations. For example, to be fair to team members in different time zones, it might be important to rotate through different meeting times so one group isn’t always stuck logging in to Zoom during nonwork hours. “You have to adjust,” said Pina Marsico, PhD, a developmental and educational psychologist at the University of Salerno and the president-elect of APA’s Division 52 (International Psychology).
When collaborating internationally, it’s also important to avoid doing scientific tourism or parachute science, Marsico said, which is typically defined as dropping into a foreign location for one’s own benefit, without engaging with the knowledge of local scientists and stakeholders. The best international projects grow out of strong ties with researchers in other countries and mutual benefit. In Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the Kitchen Seminar Networkopens in new window aims to build these kinds of ties by pairing mentees with mentors from other nations so that students start working across borders from the master’s level onward. Marsico is working on a similar, multidisciplinary network for the Southern Hemisphere called the Global South Network.
These considerations can also be important in domestic research. McCarthy is working on a proposal for a project to implement Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT), a program for loved ones of people with substance use disorders, at the Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico, which grew out of volunteer work she did at the center. Shiprock is within the Navajo Nation, so it was important to avoid a colonialist model of introducing a program that the community didn’t want, McCarthy said.
“I’m very mindful of collaborating with communities that may have had experience with research colonialism and want to make sure that anything I would be doing with them is coming from an identified need from within that community,” she said. On-the-ground collaborators can also be invaluable for logistics, such as working out ways programs can be delivered within their specific organization.
While planning ahead and thinking through workflow issues can head off many problems, disagreements may still arise. In those cases, facilitated or mediated discussions can be helpful, Gadlin said.
“Many universities have either an ombudsperson or other conflict-resolution program, and, of course, there are mediators in the private sector,” he said. “I’ve always been a big believer that facilitated conversation is a reasonable way to address conflicts.” Some collaborations might choose a neutral arbiter and agree ahead of time to follow that person’s decision about a conflict. Others set up a majority-minority opinion process, much like the U.S. Supreme Court: If there are dissenting opinions within the group about the interpretation of the results, those researchers get the chance to publish a “minority opinion” as a supplement or special section of the final research paper. Sometimes just knowing that that is an option heads off arguments, Baumgartner said, because everyone knows their voice will ultimately be heard.
And sometimes conflict is the starting point for collaboration. Adversarial collaboration, first developed over two decades ago by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, PhD, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, is when scientists with opposing theoretical views conduct experiments jointly. This forces transparency in methods and rigor from the beginning of a study and can avoid years of back-and-forth and criticism between teams working separately. Kahneman and his first adversarial collaborators, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec, published their research on the experience of regret in 1998, finding that both sides were a little bit right (Psychological Review, Vol. 105, No. 3opens in new window). The Adversarial Collaboration Projectopens in new window at the University of Pennsylvania supports these types of research partnerships, which are still rare.
Reaping the benefits
There are often structural barriers to collaborations, especially collaborating across disciplines. It can be hard to move money from one department to another, Gorgens said, complicating funding issues. Funding structures aren’t often set up to distribute small amounts of money to multiple labs, Baumgartner said, meaning a lot of big team science in psychology relies on volunteer efforts and researchers piggybacking experiments onto projects they already have running. Rigid rules around authorship and credit can also de-incentivize working together. To simplify the process, Baumgartner and her colleagues are advocating for the standard use of the Contributor Roles Taxonomyopens in new window, a system for divvying up credit refined by the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information and the National Information Standards Organization.
“Every chance we get, we’re trying to bring up these points with more senior people in the field with power on hiring and tenure committees to help those people understand the benefits and importance of participating in big team research,” Baumgartner said. In her field, which relies on infant research, the biggest benefit is data pooling. Infant participants are hard to recruit and not always cooperative in the lab, so many infant studies have tiny sample sizes. By letting a network of labs share their data, these team science collaborations enable much larger samples.
Collaborations often lead to other benefits and partnerships. Vicki Gier, PhD, an experimental psychologist in memory and cognition at Mississippi State University–Meridian, began working with researchers at other institutes more than 15 years ago to deliver distance research talks to her psychology students, who, given the small department and campus, otherwise would have very limited exposure to the work of academic psychologists. That effort has now expanded internationally, with researchers from Germany, Thailand, and the Philippines giving lectures on their work. It has been a boon to Gier’s work, too.
“I also am collaborating with people now that I never would have known before if I hadn’t had the opportunity of meeting them through this,” said Gier, who presented on the effort at APA 2023.
Gorgens’ work with the local criminal justice system and legislative advocates has contributed to real-world change. In 2021, the Colorado governor signed into law S.B. 21-138, requiring screening and support for brain injury in people involved with the criminal justice system, an effort spearheaded by community advocate Marchell Taylor, who was incarcerated at the time and who was a community stakeholder in Gorgens’s research team. Soon after, a survivor of intimate partner violence (IPV) named Melissa Bickford contacted Gorgens about advocating for a similar bill for people who had experienced IPV. Gorgens was able to act as a node in a network, connecting Bickford to Taylor for mentorship. Colorado S.B. 22-057, which created a task force to begin a brain-injury screening program for survivors of IPV, passed in 2022.
“It’s harder to do the work. It’s certainly more fraught with hurdles and stress than collaborating with colleagues next door,” Gorgens said. “But my advice would be that it’s worth it, so hang in there.”
