My contribution to the discussion about the replication crisis published in Skeptical Inquirer. Enjoy reading!
For years a chorus of voices has spoken of a replication crisis in psychology, particularly social psychology. In November 2018, the results of another large replication project were published, which demonstrated that in half of known psychological experiments it is possible to generate results that are similar to—but slightly lower than—the original results. Over a period of several years, 186 researchers from sixty different laboratories on six different continents representing thirty-six different nationalities conducted replications of twenty-eight well-known studies. Over 7,000 participants from diverse cultures took part in each of them. By comparison, the average number of participants in the original studies was 112. The results demonstrated clearly that replicability of experiments is not dependent on cultural context. Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, who helped to coordinate the study, claims that their results could prove even more significant than those of the 2015 Reproducibility Project, in which a mere 36 percent of experiments were successfully reproduced. Studies were selected for replication based on a wide range of criteria, including frequency of citations, demonstrating the impact of a given study on the whole of psychology. Another, a more technical criterion was the possibility to conduct the study online via the internet, using a platform accessible to researchers from all sixty laboratories.
More in the pdf article
I wrote about replications also here:
REPLICATION CRISIS – NEXT SCENE,
and in our book:
Psychology Gone Wrong 