48 - Nicholas Coles: Asking Big Question with Big-team Science

Anjie chats with Dr. Nicholas Coles. Nicholas is a Research Scientist at Stanford University, the co-director of the Stanford Big Team Science Lab, and the Director of the Psychological Science Accelerator. He conducts research in affective science, cross-cultural psychology, and meta-science.

In affective science, Nicholas seeks to understand the social, cognitive, and physiological processes that underlie emotion. Much of his research here has focused on the facial feedback hypothesis, the idea that sensorimotor feedback from facial expressions can impact emotional processes (e.g., that smiling can make people feel happy). In meta-science, Nicholas works on building research infrastructure that allows researchers to more efficiently obtain knowledge about psychological phenomenon. In this domain, he directs the Psychological Science Accelerator: a globally distributed consortium of researchers who pool intellectual and material resources to accelerate the accumulation of generalizable knowledge in psychology.

In this episode, Anjie and Nicholas chat about a recent comment piece in Nature titled "Build up big team science".  They take a deep dive into an emerging trend in psychology – research done by a lot of people across a lot of labs. Nicholas shares the challenges, along with the promises of big team science.

You can read the comment we discussed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00150-2%0D?error=server_error
To learn more about Nicholas's research, you can visit his website: https://nicholas-coles.netlify.app/
Or you can also follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/coles_nicholas_
To learn more about PSA, here's the link to its website: https://psysciacc.org/