The replication crisis
The replication crisis is the finding, from the early 2010s onward, that a large share of published psychological results do not reappear when the studies are run again. The Open Science Collaboration repeated one hundred studies from three leading journals and reported in 2015 that well under half produced significant results the second time, and that the effects that did replicate were on average about half the original size. The causes identified were structural rather than a matter of individual fraud: small samples, flexibility in how data are analysed until something reaches significance, and journals that publish positive results and reject null ones. Well-known casualties include ego depletion, whose 2016 pre-registered multi-site replication found essentially no effect, and much of the social priming literature; Kahneman, whose own book had featured priming work, publicly acknowledged that this material had not held up.
Why it matters
It changes how every earlier finding in this curriculum should be read, and the reforms it produced, pre-registration and open data, are now the field's main quality signal.
Also written: reproducibility crisis, replicability crisis, replication failure
Where it comes up
Read about The replication crisis on Wikipedia
Sources
- Replication crisis Wikipedia
- Ego depletion WikipediaA worked example: a well-established effect that a large pre-registered replication failed to find.
- Reproducibility of Scientific Results Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
