The Replication Crisis and Messy Science

In this section, you learned about McCabe and Castel’s research study and the complexity of conducting psychological research. It turns out that many studies in psychology—including many highly cited studies—do not replicate. In an era where news is instantaneous, the failure to replicate research raises important questions about the scientific process in general and psychology specifically. People have the right to know if they can trust research evidence. For our part, psychologists also have a vested interest in ensuring that our methods and findings are as trustworthy as possible.

The non-reproducibility of findings is disturbing because it suggests the possibility that the original research was done sloppily. Even worse is the suspicion that the research may have been falsified. In science, faking results is the biggest of sins, the unforgivable sin, and for this reason, the field of psychology has been thrown into an uproar. However, there are a number of explanations for non-replication, and not all are bad. These reasons include chance, publication bias, falsified results, changing times, or poor replication.

Solutions to the Problem

Efforts to combat the reproducibility crisis include more public dissemination of replication attempts, more open science, supportive collaboration between researchers, and changing expectations so that replication is a necessity.

Ultimately, people also need to learn to be intelligent consumers of science. Instead of getting overly excited by findings from a single study, it’s wise to wait for replications. When a corpus of studies is built on a phenomenon, we can begin to trust the findings. Journalists must be educated about this too, and learn not to readily broadcast and promote findings from single flashy studies. If the results of a study seem too good to be true, maybe they are. Everyone needs to take a more skeptical view of scientific findings until they have been replicated.