Replication Crisis

A registered report survey of open research practices in psychology departments in the UK and Ireland

Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. While there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, …

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 psychological reality of the learned “p < .05” boundary

The .05 boundary within Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST) “has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move” (to quote Douglas Adams). Here, we move past meta-scientific arguments and ask an empirical question: What …