Replication Crisis

A Replication Crisis in Methodological Research?

Statisticians have been keen to critique statistical aspects of the “replication crisis” in other scientific disciplines. But new statistical tools are often published and promoted without any thought to replicability. This needs to change, argue …

A Social Psychological Model of Scientific Practices: Explaining Research Practices and Outlining the Potential for Successful Reforms

A crescendo of incidents have raised concerns about whether scientific practices in psychology may be suboptimal, sometimes leading to the publication, dissemination, and application of unreliable or misinterpreted findings. Psychology has been a …

A survey on how preregistration affects the research workflow: better science but more work

The preregistration of research protocols and analysis plans is a main reform innovation to counteract confirmation bias in the social and behavioural sciences. While theoretical reasons to preregister are frequently discussed in the literature, the …

Approaching Psychology’s Current Crises by Exploring the Vagueness of Psychological Concepts: Recommendations for Advancing the Discipline

Psychology is currently facing a multilayered crisis stemming from the fact that the results of many psychological studies cannot be replicated (replication crisis), that psychological research has neglected cross-cultural and cross-temporal …

Comparing Analysis Blinding With Preregistration in the Many-Analysts Religion Project

In psychology, preregistration is the most widely used method to ensure the confirmatory status of analyses. However, the method has disadvantages: Not only is it perceived as effortful and time-consuming, but reasonable deviations from the analysis …

Ethnography vs. zombie methodologies: What anthropology can teach psychology about nonreproducibility

Beginning in 2011, public scandals and high-visibility critiques of research methods in psychology fed a broader “replication crisis”: foundational experiments could not be replicated, and statistical methods in social psychology demonstrated …

Preregistration of Modeling Exercises May Not Be Useful

This is a commentary on Lee et al.’s (2019) article encouraging preregistration of model development, fitting, and evaluation. While we are in general agreement with Lee et al.’s characterization of the modeling process, we disagree on whether …

The Problem of New Evidence: P-Hacking and Pre-Analysis Plans

We provide a novel articulation of the epistemic peril of p-hacking using three resources from philosophy: predictivism, Bayesian confirmation theory, and model selection theory. We defend a nuanced position on p-hacking: p-hacking is sometimes, but …

The replication crisis is less of a “crisis” in the Lakatosian approach than it is in the Popperian and naïve methodological falsificationism approaches

Popper’s (1983, 2002) philosophy of science has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the wake of the replication crisis, offering a philosophical basis for the ensuing science reform movement. However, adherence to Popper’s approach may also be at …

The Tone Debate: Knowledge, Self, and Social Order

In the replication crisis in psychology, a “tone debate” has developed. It concerns the question of how to conduct scientific debate effectively and ethically. How should scientists give critique without unnecessarily damaging relations? The …