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Research as it Happens
Working Together
In the previous episode, we followed how a simple question about a classic finding in psychology grew into a large international research project.
In this episode, we take a closer look at what that shift means in practice.
What happens when research moves from a single study to a collaboration involving dozens of labs? How do you organize such a project—and what new challenges emerge along the way?
I speak with Katja Pronizius (University of Vienna, Austria), one of the authors of The Advantage of Big Team Science about the structure of big team science, its advantages, and the challenges that come with working at scale. These include issues of coordination, communication across cultures, and the distribution of responsibility within large teams.
In the second part of the episode, I talk to Bjørn Sætrevik (University of Bergen, Norway) about what it is like to work inside such a large-scale collaboration. The conversation turns to a question that quickly becomes central in projects like this: how to assign roles and give credit when many people contribute in different ways.
Together, these conversations highlight how scaling up research changes not only how studies are conducted, but also how contributions are organized, recognized, and made meaningful.
At this stage of the project, labs are still joining and working groups are being formed. The structure of the collaboration is taking shape—and many of the questions discussed in this episode are becoming directly relevant.
Mentioned in the episode:
Article Katja Pronizius: https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/12/1/160129/218054/The-Advantage-of-Big-Team-Science-Lessons-Learned
Preprint Bjørn Sætrevik: https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/9kwnq_v1
Music written and played by Rolf Zwaan
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1. Where it starts
36:24||Season 1, Ep. 1In Research as it Happens, we go inside a large-scale psychology project, where labs around the world collaborate to study human memory. Each episode follows the process in real time—how ideas develop, experiments are designed, evidence is evaluated, and how researchers decide what to do next.In this first episode of Research as it Happens, we go back to where the project began.What starts as a simple question—how robust is a well-known finding?—quickly opens up a much larger set of issues about how research is done, how evidence is evaluated, and how scientific knowledge develops over time.The project itself grew out of a conversation between Rolf Zwaan and Anita Eerland about a classic study in psychology: Loftus and Palmer (1974) The study showed that the way a question is phrased can influence what people remember about an event—a finding that has become a staple in psychology textbooks.In this episode:Rolf talks with Anita Eerland (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands) about how that initial conversation at the kitchen table developed into a large-scale, international research project that they are now leading.He also speaks with Massimo Grassi (University of Padua, Italy) about how he uses the Loftus study in his teaching, and what he expects from a project that revisits such a well-established finding.Together, these conversations highlight how even familiar results can raise new questions when examined more closely—and how different researchers bring different perspectives to the same problem.At the time of recording, the project is still in its early stages, with researchers joining from labs around the world and smaller teams forming to develop materials and plan the first studies.This is where it starts.Music written and played by Rolf ZwaanMentioned in the episode:Target study:Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589.Blog posts Rolf:Memory, Misinformation, and the Need to Replicate https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-the-needMemory, Misinformation, and Loftus and Palmer, Revisited https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3 https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-loftusMultilab studies by Massimo Grassi:https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459251379432https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-06654-0