The consequences of fraud are devastating for a scientist, leading to dishonor and usually to the loss of job and career. Scientists know any important result will be subjected to attempts at replication. This provides a powerful incentive for honesty among researchers. Students are taught that a research report should include all necessary details to permit replication. However, it is often impossible to find all relevant details about how research is conducted in a published report of research.
Sometimes, to carry out an exact replication, one must contact earlier researchers to learn details of a procedure. Gasparikova-Krasnec and Ging found that researchers were generally cooperative in providing information needed for replications. A month's wait was normally all that was required. Researchers typically realize that double-checking surprising results is important to science.
A failed replication may have a stimulating effect on a field of research. Replication failures inspire new studies to figure out why an attempt to use the "same" procedures led to different results. A fine-grained analysis of the experimental procedures may reveal some key details that were different, when comparing the original study to the replication. If a replication fails, but the original researchers believe their original finding is correct, they will suggest ways to tighten up controls or other procedures to improve the chances of a successful replication.
They hope the results will come back if another replication is attempted with improved techniques. On some occasions, replication failures continue. False claims—including those that start as honest mistakes—produce a distinctive pattern during successive attempts at replication: the effects get smaller and smaller as more replications are conducted. This happened, for example, in the case of cold fusion: a desktop apparatus was said to produce fusion energy. In psychology, it happened with cardiac conditioning : claims that heart rates could be altered directly through conditioning procedures.
Diminishing effects with repeated replications occur not because an actual effect is disappearing, but because scientists are eliminating errors with better controls, as they make additional attempts at replication.
A solid, scientific finding will gain more support as people continue to test it. Tversky, A. Science , — PubMed Article Google Scholar. Inbar, Y. Emotion 9 , PubMed Google Scholar. Article Google Scholar. Download references. Correspondence 09 NOV News 09 NOV News 08 NOV News 04 NOV Research Highlight 03 NOV News 22 OCT Human thought and behavior is a remarkably subtle and ever-changing subject to study, so variations are to be expected when observing diverse populations and participants.
Some research findings might be wrong, but digging deeper, pointing out the flaws, and designing better experiments helps strengthen the field. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Replications in psychology research: How often do they really occur?
Perspectives on Psychological Science. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Kahneman D. A new etiquette for replication.
Social Psychology. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.
We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Science ought to embrace and learn from failure. This prompted a reckoning : Common practices like drawing on small samples of college students were found to be insufficient to find true experimental effects.
Scientists thought if you could find an effect in a small number of people, that effect must be robust. But often, significant results from small samples turn out to be statistical flukes. For more on this, read our explainer on p-values. The crisis intensified in when a group of psychologists, which included Nosek, published a report in Science with evidence of an overarching problem: When psychologists tried to replicate experiments published in top journals, only around 40 percent of the studies held up.
The remainder either failed or yielded inconclusive data. And again, the replications that did work showed weaker effects than the original papers. The studies that tended to replicate had more highly significant results compared to the ones that just barely crossed the threshold of significance. As part of the new study, Nosek and his colleagues added a prediction component. The bets largely tracked with the final results. As you can see in the chart below, the yellow dots are the studies that did not replicate, and they were all unfavorably ranked by the prediction market survey.
One thing that stands out: Many of the papers that failed to replicate sound a little too good to be true. Take this paper that finds simply washing hands negates a common human hindsight bias. When we make a tough choice, we often look back on the choice we passed on unfavorably and are biased to find reasons to justify our decision.
All that said, there are some promising signs that social science is getting better. More and more scientists are preregistering their study designs. This prevents them from cherry-picking results and analyses that are more favorable to their favored conclusions.
0コメント