The cognitive psychologist writes:
Collaboration between researchers has become increasingly common, enabling a level of discovery and innovation that is difficult if not impossible to achieve by a single person. But how can one establish and maintain an environment that fosters successful collaboration within a research group? In this case study, I use my own experience when directing the ABC Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. I first describe the heuristic principles for setting up a research group, including (i) common topic and multiple disciplines, (ii) open culture, (iii) spatial proximity, and (iv) temporal proximity. Then I describe heuristics for maintaining the open culture, such as setting collective goals, including contrarians, distributing responsibility, making bets, the cake rule, and side-by-side writing. These heuristics form an “adaptive toolbox” that shapes the intellectual and social climate. They create a culture of friendly but rigorous discussion, embedded in a family-like climate of trust where everyone is willing to expose their ignorance and learn from the other members. Feeling accepted and trusted encourages taking the necessary risks to achieve progress in science.
This all makes sense to me. I’ve never been very good about organizing research groups myself, so probably I should try to follow this advice.
Here are Gigerenzer’s principles for How to Start a Research Group:
Principle 1: Common topic, multiple disciplines
Principle 2: Create an open culture
Principle 3: Spatial proximity
Principle 4: Temporal proximity
Then, How to Maintain a Culture:
Set collective goals
Distribute responsibility
Secure open culture
One thing I’d like to hear more about is the difficulty of setting all of this up. Here are some challenges:
– To ensure spatial proximity, you need an institution to commit to the space, which in turn can require “politics”; that is, negotiation with powerful people at the institution to secure the space as needed.
– To ensure temporal proximity, you need a steady flow of funds, which requires fundraising or grant-writing. The challenge is to be able to do this without being overwhelmed, as in some biomedical labs where it seems that the only thing ever going on is writing grant proposals.
– There’s also the challenge of getting people in the same room at a time where email and remote meetings are so easy.
There are other challenges too. Setting up an open culture isn’t hard for me, but some of the other steps have been difficult. One thing I like is that the lab that Gigerenzer runs is not called the Gigerenzer Lab. So many professors do this, having the lab named after themselves, and that just seems so tacky.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read the article. But I wish there was a point about sharing data among collaborators. We’ve seen too many examples of jointly authored work where it seems that only one author actually handled the data (if that), but there were subsequent issues that none of the other authors could speak to.
This is brilliant advice which is intuitive once said, but hard to articulate in the first place. I will attempt to replicate in my current group.
I can attest that during my PhD I was in a group which am now realising ticked most of these boxes, and was a thoroughly satisfying and fulfilling experience. Near the end, when some of these principles began to be violated due to unmitigated external factors, the culture started to fray (and with it, the positive experience).
The advice in the article about including a contrarian is all well and good, but a precondition of that is that the PI is happy to be questioned and willing to change direction when major flaws in their programme arise. I know people who have spent a lot of effort critiquing colleagues’ work in a spirit of improvement (rather than sniping), and yet have become disillusioned because PIs and disciples have not been willing to admit to any shortcomings in their work in print or to funders.
Five heuristics to start, and continue, with a research group in current day academia:
1 Don’t think too much about the cost of things. The money you receive directly or indirectly via the tax-payer or governmental institution can be used to pay your new standing desk and conferences abroad or free lunches for you and your “collaborators”. You are probably worth it, and the money is probably well spend on your particular research and overhead costs and such things.
2 Don’t think too much about whether you, as a scientist, should make sure other scientists (independent of you) have the resources and opportunity to replicate your work, or provide critical feedback, or come up with alternative hypotheses and research. Don’t think too much about whether such things are crucial in science, and should always be possible. Don’t think too much about whether your large “collaborative” efforts might make these things practically impossible for other, independent, scientists.
3 An “open culture” only relates to certain things, and not others. It’s highly unlikely that you will provide a clear and consise overview of how exactly you spend your grant money somewhere in your paper for example. And you will probably not stop supporting, and participating in, the “traditional” publishing system which may not be as “open” to others as it is to you. All that matters is using the word “open” a lot.
4 The same goes for “collaboration”. You should use this word a lot as well in trying to get attention and money for your research and papers. You will probably think it’s “collaborative” to have a few colleagues and work “collaboratively” on something and ask and receive lots of funding and attention of which you benefit disproportionately. You might even be so “inclusive” in all your “collaboration” that it “excludes” everyone that doesn’t “collaborate” with you. But maybe that all doesn’t matter, just use the word “collaboration” over and over and over.
5 It probably helps to be a bit narcissistic and/or psychopathic in all of this. And it probably helps to hire, and “collaborate”, with people who are as well, or who are willing to do as told. Casual contracts in academia, power differences in senior-junior relationships, and the cult-like characteristics of academia may all help in this and are already in place for you to use. If there are wolves and sheep and sheep dogs in academia you have got to make sure you “collaborate” with other wolves, hire and use sheep, and make sure sheep dogs are driven out of academia or at least don’t have a chance to be critical of your research or put forward alternatives.
That’s all.
Harsh but fair.
Being in the private sector now (formerly a professor, but to be clear did not run a research group of the size/nature as Gigerenzer), I find “project management” philosophy an interesting subject. It is so subjective, it is hard to make it jive with my stats or decision making background in a coherent way.
So in tech, the dominant project management style is Agile. Agile has “ceremonies” that have similar end goals to Gigerenzer here. So the “daily standup” is a way to facilitate transparency between different groups. Agile is very bureaucratic though — I prefer Gigerenzer’s approach here that is less focused on specific actions but more high level “what is the goal”.
Here in New Zealand I had never come across naming a research lab after its lead researcher until a couple of years before retiring. The person in question was American so I assumed it was a US thing.
Ironic that a post about a cognitive psychologist reminds me of my own biases I guess.
These seems like good heuristics, though most labs I’ve worked in over the past decade haven’t followed all of them for various reasons. I’d be curious how pioneers across fields operate (e.g. Nobel winners). Can we explain part of their success due to organizational behaviors? Organizational science and industrial/organizational psychology would probably have even more to say about effective teamwork that Gerd.
P.S. Running a lab named after what you’re studying is increasingly common. Maybe a generational shift?
Naming a “lab” after yourself is a new-ish thing, and applies quite explicitly *not* to a collaborative project. If Prof. John Smith has a lab, he might call it the “Smith Lab”. If he had a collaborator, say Prof. Mary Jones, she would have her own “Jones Lab”, and any collaborative physical space would have some other name, if it had a name at all.
I think the self-naming originated from the need to put a title on web pages. Pre-web, for example, the geneticist Dick Lewontin’s students and associates working together on the floor they occupied at the Museum of Comparative Zoology was known informally as “Lewontin’s lab”, but it’s formal name was “Population Genetics”.
If people are returning to using subject matter names, as Jay Patel suggests, that would be a return to earlier practice and, to my mind, a good thing. A subject matter name would seem to be required for a collaborative lab (i.e. a lab space/project shared by two or more “principal investigators”), and, for individual labs, would be, as Andrew puts it, less “tacky”.
“run the group as a jam session, not as a conductor that directs from a podium”
As someone who also jams, YES!!!!
My lab is referred to as the Parthasarathy Lab. What else are people supposed to call it? We started out mostly studying membrane biophysics, so should it have been the Membrane Biophysics lab? Then when we were roughly half and half Membrane Biophysics and Host-Associated Microbial Communities, should it have switched to the Membrane Biophysics and Host-Associated Microbial Communities Lab? And then switched to “Microbial Communities plus some Forays into Immunology and Behavior.” I forgot to add “Instrument and Algorithm Development.” We could try “Biophysics Lab,” but that would be ridiculous since we’re not the only Biophysicists around.
Like all research groups, the group doesn’t even have formal name written down somewhere — the naming is just how it’s referred to, e.g. on web pages or on the door. Perhaps it seems “tacky” to refer to it b the PI’s name (i.e. me), but I really am curious to know what you’d suggest in its stead.
I think a lab or group should just be named after whatever it’s centered around. So if it’s centered around an individual and whatever they happen to be interested in at the moment then it makes sense to call it [name] Lab. If it’s centered around a particular project or subfield then it should be called [Subfield] Lab.
Raghu:
First off, yes, I said it was tacky, but we often do tacky things. I’ve been to Disneyland. It was tacky but I still had a good time. There are many things worse than being tacky.
As to the name of your lab: I don’t know! I don’t have a lab or even a formal research groups. I just have a lot of overlapping projects, and I don’t think I’m a very good project manager. I can’t bring myself to creating a Gelman Lab, but maybe that would be better than my current disorganized state.
My sister runs the very successful Conceptual Development Lab—maybe you could think of a name like that, which is sufficiently general to capture most or all the projects that are going on there, while being specific enough to be a good description of what you do? I’m guessing she calls it that rather than the Gelman Lab because her sense of what is “tacky” is similar to mine. Amusingly enough, the url for the Conceptual Development Lab is https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/gelman-lab/, but I’m guessing that she didn’t pick the name of the website!
Hi, Andrew:
What do you call a collection of ten people who are all funded by grants where you are PI and all work with you collaboratively on research and stats software? I think most people would use the word “lab” in academia, but I’m curious about how you thought of it.
Bob:
I guess I’d use the term “research group.” Right now I’m not part of any such group of ten people, but even when I was part of such a group, I wasn’t successful in organizing it in the manner of an academic lab or research group. I tried to do lab meetings etc., but this never seems to work. I’m not proud of that! Organizing a lab or research group would be a useful skill for me. For better or worse, my research seems to work better when I think of it as many different overlapping projects with different, often overlapping, groups of collaborators. I’ve tried to adapt my organizational style to better match my research style and organizational strengths and weaknesses.
I have been thinking about the naming a lab after yourself-part of this blogpost, and wondered whether it could be considered to be a bit unscientific and/or narcissistic. That in turn made me think about other possible things in present-day science and academia which can be considered to be a bit unscientific and/or narcissistic.
This is my top five, counting down for dramatic effect:
5 Being an editor or peer-reviewer and thinking you have the knowledge and wisdom to decide whether or not a particular paper should be published.
4 Accepting, and being glad with receiving, an award in science.
3 Naming a certain effect that you have “discovered”, and do lots of research on, after yourself.
2 Naming a lab after yourself.
1 Supporting, and participating in, a system of science and publishing which largely only allows a small group of people to (optimally) participate in it by supporting, and participating in, the “traditional” publishing system, application for grants, hierarchical academic position system, etc.
Anon:
I respect your perspective but let me push back here. In response to your points:
5. Editing and peer-reviewing is a service to the scientific community. Editors and peer reviewers do a lot of work to help make papers better. They are not perfect—as I’ve said many times, I think post-publication review is better—; that doesn’t mean that they’re useless. Also, editors and peer-reviewers do not “decide whether or not a particular paper should be published.” They decide whether to publish a paper in their journal. Just about every paper can be published somewhere, and that’s fine.
4. For me, it’s about the work. I think some of my work is really good, and I’m happy to see it get awards and recognition which might encourage others to explore its value.
3, 2. I do think it’s tacky to name things after yourself, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unscientific” or even “narcissistic” to do so; it’s just a convention that some people follow.
1. I do request research funding because I think the work we’re doing is useful, and I think it’s a valuable use of government or corporate resources to support it. I don’t see this as being “unscientific” or “narcissistic.”
Thank you for the reply and push back!
And, thank you for giving people like me (a non-academic) a place to share their thoughts. If you didn’t provide me with this place to share my thoughts, I may have gone on a search and found another place to share my thoughts, but that just wouldn’t be the same perhaps. Maybe it’s more useful to share them in this particular place. In this light, I thank you for not being like a journal with an editor and peer-reviewers.
Concerning peer-review and editing: Given all the problematic issues in science or academia, I don’t think editing and peer-reviewing is a service to the scientific community. I also think editing and peer-reviewing is likely not a service to the general, non-scientific, community at large.
I think I agree largely with the role of post-publication review though, at least in some way. This resonates with what I have written in my latest manuscript. Basically, I think everything should be published, and if and how the papers are used and/or cited is all the peer-review and/or quality-control that might be needed and desirable.
Concerning awards in science: If it’s about the work, perhaps the awards in science should explicitly concern the paper, not the person. As I have written in one of my manuscripts:
“If, and that may be a big if, there are scientifically useful and/or valid reasons to hand out awards (cf. Zuckerman, 1992), perhaps explicitly handing out awards to papers instead of people would serve the same purpose, and would be more in line with scientific values and principles. Psychological scientists build on each other’s work, and should be reminded of that every time they read or cite something that has been written by someone else. This view of building on previous work by others is perhaps best captured by the metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, and Isaac Newton who wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of giants” (Newton, 1675/1676). Concerning Psychological Science and individual awards: perhaps standing on the shoulders of a giant does not necessarily imply the dwarf has been looking in the right direction; perhaps the giant later turns out to be a dwarf, or the dwarf later turns out to be a giant; and perhaps there are many giants, and many dwarfs, who are standing on each other’s shoulders. If any of these things are possible and/or probable, it shouldn’t be about which giant, or which dwarf, is on top at a certain point in time. It should be about what can be, and has been, seen.”
Concerning the words “unscientific” and “narcissitic”: Thank you for your comments regarding the meaning and useage of these words. I may have used them incorrectly or sub-optimally, but I still think they largely make sense. Here is my reasoning for that. If science is about finding truths (whatever that means and implies) and contributing to knowledge (whatever that means and implies), I reason that anything that interferes with that might be considered to be “unscientific”. In that light, possibly emphasizing the person and not the content or the scientific process by handing out awards to individual people, or naming a lab after a person is “unscientific” to me.
“Narcissistic” can be defined as “characterstic of those having an inflated idea of their own importance”. I reason this might be related to one’s view of one’s own work, and importance, and value. I subsequently also reason that this in turn might relate to one’s willingness to, for example, ask and receive funding, and participate in the hierarchical journal system where certain people get money and get published in certain journals and others not.
I have also wondered about the gist of this reasoning in relation to me commenting on this blog, or me publishing my own manuscripts. I have wondered whether it might be a bit narcissistic in a way of me to publish my manuscripts and sort of implicitly or explicitly ask attention for it and wanting people to perhaps read it.
I have “solved” this for myself, and/or it was largely “solved” through my circumstances and not working in academia, by not participating in the traditional journal system and merely posting my manuscripts on SSRN. I reason that this “asks” for the least amount of attention, and might involve the least amount of possible narcissism compared to sending in my manuscript to a journal that is part of the hierarchical journal system and which involves giving attention to certain manuscripts and people and not other manuscripts and people.
I don’t think it is necessarily an indicator of narcissism if one thinks ones work could or should be published in an academic journal. If someone works in academia or at a university, this is on some level simply their job, and necessary for their career that they submit and be published in journals. There are problems with that, but I don’t think they are primarily to do with narcissism among people who submit their papers to journals.
To that extent it is totally ordinary/normal in this ecosystem, it seems a fairly poor marker for narcissism. Indeed, taking a fairly dim view of publishing, peer review, etc., one may even participate in this system purely because it is necessary/simply considered part of ones job, and not even consider it a mark of distinction that ones work is published.
Quote from above: “(…) one may even participate in this system purely because it is necessary/simply considered part of ones job, and not even consider it a mark of distinction that ones work is published.”
One of the things that have annoyed me the most in recent years is all the talk about “the publish or perish system” and “the incentives” and the almost complete lack of talk about personality, choices, and options concerning the individuals who participate, and have participated, in all of this.
The possible importance of personality, choices, etc. concerning researchers and problematic issues in science can posssibly be inferred from a paper by Tijdink et al. (2016) titled “Personality Traits Are Associated with Research Misbehavior in Dutch Scientists: A Cross-Sectional Study”. In it the following can be read:
“In our analysis, Machiavellianism was associated with self-reported research misbehavior. Machiavellianism is best described as ‘a person’s tendency to be unemotional, detached from conventional morality and hence to deceive and manipulate others, to focus on unmitigated achievement and give high priority to own performances”.
“Our secondary analyses suggest that narcissistic and psychopathic traits are more common in higher academic ranks and that scientists in higher academic ranks have less self-esteem. This could imply that the personality traits narcissism and psychopathy offer some kind of ‘survival benefit’ in academia.”
I agree with James (1995) who writes that: “Similarly, it is wrong to think of science as a process independent of its practitioners. Scientists are people. Some are straightforward. Others are devious, confused, lazy, careless, psychotic, depressed, manic or the victims of domestic trouble.” (p. 474). I have tried to get some attention for this kind of stuff by writing a few manuscripts, and by now mentioning narcissism on this blog for instance.
Anon, we must be talking past each other. I’m perfectly happy to grant all of the considerations/citations above, nor do I think we should ignore “personality, choices, and options concerning the individuals who participate, and have participated, in all of this”.
But my key statement was simply “I don’t think it is necessarily an indicator of narcissism if one thinks ones work could or should be published in an academic journal”. That supposition is not counteracted by any of the research or considerations you’ve referred to. Many people have been trained in a system in which publishing in scientific journals in simply what it means to be doing science. Again I think there is much to be said about the negatives of this attitude and broader impact on science but I just don’t think it is reasonable to consider it even a rather light indicator of narcissism to think ones work could or should be published in such a journal.
Jamie,
and yet by the research he cites: “narcissistic and psychopathic traits are more common in higher academic ranks and that scientists in higher academic ranks have less self-esteem.”
So being in “higher academic ranks” which necessarily means publishing a lot of stuff, **does** necessarily act as an “indicator of narcissism or psychopathy”… Not a 100% reliable indicator, but basically if you walk into a room and are introduced to three people, one of whom is a librarian, one is a restaurant cook, and one is an academic professor… you would be correct to say to yourself “that academic is far more likely to be a psychopath than the other two”
It can be interesting to take this psychopathy test:
https://www.idrlabs.com/psychopathy-spectrum/test.php
a lot of the questions relate to things closely related to stuff we hear a lot from academics like
“I just unthinkingly calculate p values because everyone does it and it’s what you need to do to succeed, as long as I get a low p value that’s what matters because then I can publish”
“It’s ok to lie on this grant application about how far I’ve already come in my research because all the other applicants are lying and if you don’t lie you can’t ever get funded”
“It’s ok to not put money in the grant for a data analyst, we can just find some up and coming pre-tenured professor to do the work for us in exchange for a publication credit”
“My grad student should be working 12 hour days, and what do they think they’re doing getting married while still in grad school?”
These kinds of things related to the “manipulative” aspect of psychopathy. The other aspect is impulsiveness and emotional disregulation. Most academics aren’t going to be impulsive and emotionally disregulated, which tends to come along with violent behavior. So you are talking about a different kind of person than the street-gang hitman in federal prison or whatever.
Still, academia heavily selects for manipulative self-aggrandizing liars.
It’s not by ANY means the ONLY people in academia, but I do think it’s more and more common, especially in the last 10-15 years as manipulative self-aggrandizing liars have heavily invaded the business and administrative end of universities in the US (and unfortunately also invaded the tech industry, finance industry, real estate…)
I always like to back up that claim about administration by pointing heavily at my favorite example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Puliafito who personally tried to ruin my wife’s career in between hits of methamphetamines while naked with prostitutes in his office.
Daniel, your points seem targeted towards success in academia and there I can quite agree that psychopathic and narcissistic traits are likely over-represented among the very successful. That being said, this is also the case for a wide range of careers (and I would not be at all surprised if it were also the case for top level chefs who are, at least anecdotally, notoriously demanding, inconsiderate, and narcissistic).
I still simply question whether it is reasonable to say that participating in the journal system of academia is a good sign of being narcissistic, and certainly it is not necessarily the case that thinking ones work could be published in an academic journal means one has an inflated sense of ones importance. For many it could as easily be they have a deflated sense of the quality of other work or the bar that is set for publication or, again, the sense that that is just what one needs to be doing.
I don’t disagree with your points about academia and academic success and have met or heard of many a successful psychopath in my time in academia, just specifically this idea about publications and inflated self importance.
These heuristics all seem reasonable but I would like to know on what basis we determine that a lab is successful. Certainly this lab gets a lot of papers out and a lot of citations etc. but it is really difficult to determine the value of a lab relative to all the funding coming in and what the people involved might have been doing were they not in that lab, or what that money might have done elsewhere. I’m not saying this lab is not successful, but just that when I hear about how to run a ‘successful lab’ I immediately wonder upon what metrics this success is judged, and it is far from a simple matter.
+1
(With the caveat that in the text here it doesn’t actually say ‘successful’ lab, but I think it is assumed if one is giving advice on how to do things!)
Duh, a lab is successful if it gets a lot of funding! That’s the only metric that anyone cares about at the institution level.
I have wondered more and more over the years whether publications are merely instrumental concerning asking and receiving funding.
And I have wondered more and more whether the phrase “publish or perish” might (thus?) better be replaced by “pass the hat or perish”, or “funded or faded”, or “financed or finished”, or something like that in all the discussions about “the incentives” and “the publish or perish” system and all that stuff.
“financed or finished” seems pretty good! I think this often is where the rubber meets the road. Not all funders seem able or concerned to track if they’re even getting anything out of the money. I’m aware of a ‘highly successful’ researcher at a Dutch university who keeps racking up grants, but if you track the publications from a previous grant, it would amount to over half a million euro per paper. This is in psychology/cognitive science, so it is not like this is paying for a particle accelerator or anything!