The Unbearable Limitations of Solo Science: Team Science as a Path for more Rigorous and Relevant Research

Abstract

Both early social psychologists and the modern, interdisciplinary scientific community have advocated for diverse team science. We echo this call and describe three common pitfalls of solo science illustrated by the target article. We discuss how a collaborative and inclusive approach to science can both help researchers avoid these pitfalls and pave the way for more rigorous and relevant research.

Fear not of cognition in context

“…There has been a groundswell of papers focused on scientific reform, meta-science or advancement of approaches to cognitive research. This work includes the norms around statistical analysis (Dienes, 2011), method registration (Nosek, Ebersole, DeHaven, & Mellor, 2018), sharing of data and materials (Martone, Garcia-Castro, & VandenBos, 2018), large-scale cooperative studies (Frank et al, 2017;Moshontz et al, 2018), participant sample diversity (Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, & Mortenson, 2020;Rowley & Camacho, 2015) and the relationship between theory and experiments (Devezer, Navarro, Vandekerckhove, & Buzbas, 2021;van Rooij & Baggio, 2020) and other concerns (Borsboom, van der Maas, Dalege, Kievit, & Haig, 2021;Ledgerwood, Pickett, Navarro, Remedios, & Lewis, 2021). Many of these proposals have already had an impact on how we do research.…”