International collaborations are a natural outgrowth of “big team science,” an effort dating to the early 1990s that aims to bring together many labs and many researchers to collect data from large, diverse samples of people. Crossing borders can be a boon for reproducibility and generalizability. It can enable comprehensive studies of large global problems, such as climate change and political polarization. It is also a way to test whether a common assumption—that results might vary across culture and context—is actually true.
“Almost all of the questions that psychologists ask have an assumption that there’s going to be heterogeneity across regions or across people,” said Brian Nosek, PhD, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia and the executive director of the Center for Open Science. Nosek collaborated on Many Labs, a 10-year-long project that attempted to globally replicate selected findings in psychology. When these findings failed to replicate, he explained, people did as they had often done, pointing to geographical or cultural differences as a possible explanation despite the fact that those moderators had rarely been tested directly. The Many Labs research team found that, despite occasional cultural variation, findings that replicated tended to replicate across cultures and geographies while findings that did not replicate tended to fail everywhere (Klein, R. A., et al. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2018).
Many Labs wrapped up in 2022, but global collaborations are increasingly institutionalized, with organizations like the PSA working to connect large teams of researchers across borders. Many of these collaborations explicitly take an open science approach, which involves preregistering hypotheses, methods, and analyses; making data freely available; and publishing in open access journals or making preprints available so that results are accessible to everyone.
The Network for International Collaborative Exchange (NICE), run by Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, aims to connect researchers at small, underresourced psychology programs, where it can be difficult and costly to gather large subject pools. “We’re trying to open up to areas of the world where people are not often collecting data,” said Martha Zlokovich, PhD, the former executive director of Psi Chi and the president-elect of APA Division 52 (International Psychology).
NICE has been coordinating one annual global study on a different psychological topic since 2018. Member labs submit proposals, and one is chosen each year. Participation has been steadily growing, said Zlokovich. Researchers from six countries participated in data collection the first year. In 2023–2024, 50 institutions in 18 countries contributed.
In 2024, Psi Chi also launched a National Science Foundation–funded training conference, IGNITE (Innovating Global Networks to Inspire Tomorrow’s Experts), to teach students about transparent research practices and encourage global collaborations. The first, highlighting the need to open more research opportunities to undergraduates, took place in New York City in November and drew more than 800 registrants, far exceeding the organizers’ hopes for 150, Zlokovich said. (The team put together a virtual option for the overflow.)
The Many Labs concept is now also ubiquitous, with collaborations ranging from ManyBabies, an infant-research consortium with collaborators from more than 50 countries, to ManyManys, a collaboration to compare cognition across different animal species, to ManyLabs Africa, a preregistered replication project that aims to flip the usual WEIRD-centered research pipeline by taking effects first found in Africa and replicating them in North America, Europe, and other African populations.
ManyLabs Africa aims to correct “the underrepresentation of African researchers and African thoughts in psychology,” said Adeyemi Adetula, ManyLabs Africa’s lead researcher and a doctoral student in psychology at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. Africa is projected to be home to a quarter of the world’s population by 2052, Adetula said. “We cannot ignore this population,” he said.
The project team is replicating three studies first conducted in Africa and arising out of African cultural contexts. One is on how parents perceive teen pregnancy in rural Nigeria, another is about the role of gender in condom-use negotiation among high schoolers in Ghana, and the third is on how Mozambican women respond to their husbands’ extramarital affairs in the context of a cultural expectation to ignore and forgive the infidelity (Mgbokwere, D. O., et al. Global Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2015; Teye-Kwadjo, E., et al. South African Journal of Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2018; Vera Cruz, G., Sexuality & Culture, Vol. 22, 2018).
A global view of psychology can also improve the credibility of measurement, Adetula said. Researchers around the world use different scales to measure psychological outcomes, such as اكتئاب and well-being. Though these scales are often seen as interchangeable, they may not be (Fried, E. I., Journal of Affective Disorders, Vol. 208, 2017).
Silan and his colleagues are currently testing the extent to which two universal human experiences—relationship quality and loneliness—are experienced similarly across cultures. “The form of these concepts may very likely differ not only across individuals but also systematically across cultures,” he said.
Two teams of researchers are conducting in-depth interviews in six to nine countries from different regions to get an ethnographic basis for defining the two terms, Silan said. The next step will be validation, which will expand the research to ideally dozens of countries to ensure the usefulness of the scales.
This article was written by from www.apa.org
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