Call for Collaborators — The Global Crises Project
We invite researchers worldwide to join the Global Crises Project, a large-scale international collaboration coordinated by the Behavior in Crisis Lab at Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland) in collaboration with the Centre for the Politics of Feelings of Royal Holloway, University of London (UK), and affiliated with the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA).
To join the project, please submit your expression of interest by October 31st, 2026, by filling in the following form
The Global Crises Project is a large-scale international collaboration investigating how people across 60+ countries and cultures perceive some of the most pressing challenges of our time — war, climate change, migration, political instability, global health, social inequality, cyber and digital threats, food insecurity, and others — and what motivates them to take action. At a moment when the gap between public concern and public engagement shapes societies’ capacity to respond to crises, understanding the psychological and cultural drivers of that gap is a question of both scientific and practical urgency.
The project draws on Motivational Readiness Theory to examine how perceived importance (“Want”) and efficacy beliefs (“Expectancy”) shape willingness to act, and how cultural and institutional contexts influence these processes.
The core team is composed of Ewa Szumowska (P.I.), Małgorzata Kossowska, and Giovanni Telesca (Jagiellonian University in Krakow); Manos Tsakiris and Jesse Mehravar (Royal Holloway, University of London); Ying-yi Hong (Chinese University of Hong Kong); Michele Gelfand (Stanford University); and Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland). The project is part of a larger research program funded by the National Science Centre of Poland (NCN) and is implemented through the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), following its standards for open science, transparency, and collaborative governance.
We are looking for collaborators with a background in any area relevant to the study of crisis perception and motivation to act.
Collaborators can contribute in one or more of the following roles:
- Country Lead: serving as the primary point of contact for your country and coordinating local activities
- Country Ethics Coordinator: managing ethics approval at your local institution or national level
- Translator: translating and back-translating study materials into your local language
- Cultural Adaptation Reviewer: reviewing study materials to ensure they are appropriately adapted to your country/region’s cultural context
Beyond these roles, all collaborators are expected to contribute expert input on their country context and participate in data collection (i.e., arranging panel-based recruitment for their country or, where online panels are not feasible, coordinating in-person or paper-and-pencil data collection). Final roles and their associated responsibilities will be defined in the second stage of recruitment, upon signing collaborators’ agreement (see below).
Collaborators may also be asked to participate in expert surveys drawing on their own expertise as researchers (e.g., forecasting survey) or asked to recruit participants for expert surveys in which they do not have the necessary expertise (e.g., survey about a country legal framework, existing national action plan related to crises object of study, etc.).
Researchers from the same country will be grouped into Country Teams. You do not need to cover all roles; we welcome contributions at any level.
Prior experience with PSA or other large-scale team science initiatives (though an advantage) is not a requirement.
Contributions are not restricted by institutional location: collaborators can support countries other than their own through funding, translation, or expertise in specific cultural or linguistic contexts.
We particularly encourage the participation of collaborators from regions that are historically unrepresented or underrepresented in social and political psychology research, and we have allocated a budget to support researchers from these regions where local funding is unavailable.
While financial contribution is not a requirement for participation, we encourage researchers with access to funds to consider contributing to data collection costs, either in their own country or in support of teams from underrepresented regions. Financial contributions alone, however, do not qualify for authorship: they must be accompanied by an intellectual or operational contribution in one of the roles above.
Collaborators in this project will have access to:
- Co-authorship of at least two publications in high-impact international journals (main Registered Report and data paper) granted to collaborators who fulfill at least one or more of the substantive roles above.
- Access to a large-scale international dataset spanning 60+ countries, together with full methodological documentation and translated study materials.
- The opportunity to add country-specific measures to the general survey (approximately 5 minutes of survey time) at the end of the general survey, with the option — subject to cross-team agreement — to run these in additional countries.
- The opportunity to propose and participate in secondary papers derived from further analyses of the data.
- Coordination support throughout the project, and membership in a global network of researchers working on the study of crises, with direct experience in open science and big team / many-labs collaboration.
As noted above, collaborators from historically unrepresented or underrepresented regions may also benefit from the budget we have allocated to support data collection where local funding is unavailable.
All these benefits will be granted to collaborators upon signing a collaboration agreement and fulfilling the responsibilities associated with the collaborator’s role.
To join the project, please submit your expression of interest by October 31st, 2026, by filling in the following form
We will recruit collaborators in two stages.
After the initial expression of interest, we will review applicants’ geographic distribution to balance the number of collaborators per country. This also gives us the opportunity to make a further, targeted recruitment effort for countries that did not receive any expressions of interest in the first round.
We will contact prospective collaborators by December 2026 for the second stage, in which selected teams will sign collaborator agreements (expected in early 2027), and researchers will formally join the team.
Questions and Contacts
If you have questions about the call for interest and the project, please visit our FAQs page
For other questions, please contact Ewa Szumowska and Giovanni Telesca at global_crises[at]uj.edu.pl.
Further information
For more information about the Global Crises Project, its timeline, the core team, and updates on the collaboration, browse our website
For more information about the Behavior in Crisis Lab at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, visit
For more information about the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) and its study portfolio, visit: