Independent researchers

The errors a team catches by having multiple people touch a study don't disappear when you work alone — they just go uncaught unless you replace that check with something explicit.

Scope creep in independent research is usually discussed as a budgeting and boundaries problem. It's just as often a quiet, direct threat to whether the study can actually answer its original question.

People systematically over-report virtuous behavior and under-report undesirable behavior on surveys, even when told their answers are anonymous — and the bias is predictable enough to design around.