The 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse left Chris Chartier feeling, well, a little jealous.

Chartier, like so many Americans, was awed by the whole country coming together to celebrate a force of nature. Chartier is a psychologist, and he also started to think of how precise the eclipse forecast was.

Things in psychology are more than messy — the field has been going through a very public, and painful, crisis of confidence in many of its findings. So he began to wonder: How could psychology one day wow the world with precise science of its own?

His idea was audacious: psychologists all around the world, working together to rigorously push the science forward. But it quickly became real: The Psychological Science Accelerator was born in 2017.

This year, the group published its first major paper on the snap judgments people make of others’ faces, and it has several other exciting large-scale projects in the works. Its early success suggests the accelerator could be a model for the future of psychology — if the scientists involved can sustain it.

Chartier dreamed of a distributed lab network, with researchers in outposts all around the world, who could work together, democratically, on choosing topics to study and recruiting a truly global, diverse participant pool to use in experiments. They’d preregister their study designs, meaning they promise to stick to a particular recipe in running and analyzing an experiment, which staves off the cherry-picking and p-hacking that was rampant before the replication crisis became apparent.

They’d keep everything transparent and accessible, and foster a culture of accountability to produce rigorous, meaningful work. The payoff would be to deeply study human psychology on a global scale, and to see in which ways human psychology varies around the world, and which ways it does not.

Read the full article about psychological research by Brian Resnick at Vox.