Is psychology a robust science? To answer such a question, this course will encourage you to think critically about how psychological research is conducted and how conclusions are drawn.
To enable you to truly understand how psychology functions as …
Psychology advances knowledge by testing statistical hypotheses using empirical observations and data. The expectation is that most statistically significant findings can be replicated in new data and in new laboratories, but in practice many …
In 2010–2012, a few largely coincidental events led experimental psychologists to realize that their approach to collecting, analyzing, and reporting data made it too easy to publish false-positive findings. This sparked a period of methodological …
Science is facing a “replication crisis” in which many experimental findings cannot be replicated and are likely to be false. Does this imply that many scientific facts are false as well? To find out, we explore the process by which a claim becomes …
Few models of self-control have generated as much scientific interest as has the limited strength model. One of the entailments of this model, the depletion effect, is the expectation that acts of self-control will be less effective when they follow …
Recently, a reporter in the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that “psychology is having an uneasy moment” (Zamudio-Suarez, 2016). The “uneasy moment” to which she referred is a movementof field self-criticism that has gained incredible steam and …
The current discussion of questionable research practices (QRPs) is meant to improve the quality of science. It is, however, important to conduct QRP studies with the same scrutiny as all research. We note problems with overestimates of QRP …
This paper investigates how competition to publish first and thereby establish priority impacts the quality of scientific research. We begin by developing a model where scientists decide whether and how long to work on a given project. When deciding …