On the Verge of Acceleration: The PSA has Received its First Submissions

The Psychological Science Accelerator received 7 very interesting submissions in response to our first call for studies. Submissions will be reviewed blind, and proposing researchers will remain confidential. So, while they are nameless for now, I am extremely grateful that these 7 teams were willing to take the brave step of submitting their ideas to this new and unproven project. A few facts and figures regarding submissions jumped out to me, and demonstrate some of the promising elements of this initiative:

• Submissions came from 6 different countries on 3 continents
• The career stage of the researchers spanned well-established senior faculty to graduate students
• Desired N ranged from 300 to 6,000
• The studies seek to investigate a variety of social psychological, cognitive psychological, methodological, and meta-scientific questions
• Some are novel, some are replications, and some look to extend published findings across cultures
• All have provided solid justifications for large-scale data collection across many sites

Our Study Selection Committee now has the exciting (but also slightly unenviable) task of evaluating these submissions based on their feasibility and merit. In three weeks we hope to have a set of approved studies for labs in our distributed network to join. If you would like to contribute to our decision making process, or the PSA more generally, please sign up at the link below, or email me at cchartie@ashland.edu.

Recruiting Additional Labs

It is quite possible we decide that data collection for many or all of the submissions would be both feasible and would make a substantial contribution to the field. With that in mind, we are still actively recruiting additional labs, for 2018 and beyond. If you would like to join us, please sign up here. While 165 labs have joined our network, not all can commit to data collection in 2018, and expansion of the network’s data collection capacity will directly impact the number of studies we can conduct and the magnitude and quality of our contributions to psychological science.