Is something rotten in the state of social psychology? Part Two: digging through the past

By Alex Fradera A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has taken a hard look at psychology’s crisis of replication and research quality and we’re covering its findings in two parts. In Part One, published yesterday, we reported the views of active research psychologists on the state of their field, as surveyed by Matt Motyl and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers reported a cautious optimism: research practices hadn’t been as bad as feared, and are in any case improving. But is their optimism warranted? After all, several high-profile replication projects have found that, more often than not, re-running previously successful studies produces only null results. But defenders of the state of psychology argue that replications fail for many reasons, including defects in the reproduction and differences in samples, so the implications aren’t settled. To get closer to the truth, Motyl’s team complemented their survey findings with a forensic analysis of published data, uncovering results that seem to bolster their optimistic position. In Part Two of our coverage, we look at these findings and why they’re already proving controversial. Motyl and his colleagues used a relatively new type of analysis to assess the quality and honesty of the data found in over 500 previously published papers in social psychology. Their approach is technical, involving weirdly-named statistics conducted upon even more statistics, s...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Methods Replications Social Source Type: blogs