Philosophise this – psychology research by philosophers is robust and replicates better than other areas of psychology

Experimental philosophy or X-Phi takes the tools of contemporary psychology and applies them to unravelling how people think about major topics from Western philosophy By guest blogger Dan Jones Amid all the talk of a “replication crisis” in psychology, here’s a rare good news story – a new project has found that a sub-field of the discipline, known as “experimental philosophy” or X-phi, is producing results that are impressively robust. The current crisis in psychology was largely precipitated by a mass replication attempt published by the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) project in 2015. Of 100 previously published significant findings, only 39 per cent replicated unambiguously, rising to 47 per cent on more relaxed criteria. Now a paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology has trained the replicability lens on the burgeoning field of experimental philosophy. Born roughly 15 years ago, X-Phi takes the tools of contemporary psychology and applies them to unravelling how people think about many of the major topics of Western philosophy, from the metaphysics of free will and the nature of the self, to morality and the problem of consciousness.  Take one of the earliest and most well-known findings from the field. Back in 2003, Joshua Knobe, now at Yale University, set out to study what determines whether we describe the outcome of someone’s behaviour as intentional or not. Knobe ran two short vignettes by his participants. One described the CEO of a...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: guest blogger Methods Replications Source Type: blogs