Title: Brian Nosek's Reproducibility Project Finds Many Psychology Studies Unreliable - The Atlantic
Headings: How Reliable Are Psychology Studies?
How Reliable Are Psychology Studies?
Content: How the eye works is probably very consistent across people but how people react to self-esteem threat will vary a lot,” says Nosek. Cognitive experiments also tend to test the same people under different conditions (a within-subject design) while social experiments tend to compare different people under different conditions (a between-subject design ). Again, people vary so much that social-psychology experiments can struggle to find signals amid the noise. More generally, failed replications don’t discredit the original studies, any more than successful ones enshrine them as truth. There are many reasons why two attempts to run the same experiment might produce different results. There’s random chance. The original might be flawed. So might the replication. There could be subtle differences in the people who volunteered for both experiments, or the way in which those experiments were done. And, to be blunt, the replicating team might simply lack nous or technical skill to pull off the original experiments.