Author Archives: David Funder

               As I mentioned in my previous post, while I’m sympathetic to many of the ideas that have been suggested about how to improve the reliability of psychological knowledge and move towards “scientific utopia,” my own thoughts are less ambitious and keep returning to the basic issue of replication.  A scientific culture that consistently produced direct replications of important results would be one that eventually purged itself of many of the problems people having been worrying about lately, including questionable research practices, p-hacking, and even data fraud.

But, as I also mentioned in my previous post, this is obviously not happening.  Many observers have commented on the institutional factors that discourage the conduct and, even more, the publication of replication studies.  These include journal policies, hiring committee practices, tenure standards, and even the natural attractiveness of fun, cute, and counter-intuitive findings.  In this post, I want to focus on a factor that has received less attention: the perilous plight of the (non) replicator.

The situation of a researcher who has tried and failed to replicate a prominent research finding is an unenviable one.  My sense is that the typical non-replicator started out as a true believer, not a skeptic.  For example, a few years ago I spent sabbatical time at a large, well-staffed and well-equipped institute in which several researchers were interested in a very prominent finding in their field, and wished to test further hypotheses they had generated about its basis.  As good scientists, they began by making sure that they could reproduce the basic effect.  To their surprise and increasing frustration, they simply could not.  They followed the published protocol, contacted the original investigator for more details, tweaked this, tweaked that.  (As I said, they had lots of resources. Continue reading →

Can we believe everything (or anything) that social psychological research tells us?  Suddenly, the answer to this question seems to be in doubt.  The past few months have seen a shocking series of cases of fraud –researchers literally making their data up — by prominent psychologists at prestigious universities.  These revelations have catalyzed an increase in concern about a much broader issue, the replicability of results reported by social psychologists.  Numerous writers are questioning common research practices such as selectively reporting only studies that “work” and ignoring relevant negative findings that arise over the course of what is euphemistically called “pre-testing,” increasing N’s or deleting subjects from data sets until the desired findings are obtained and, perhaps worst of all, being inhospitable or even hostile to replication research that could, in principle, cure all these ills.

Reaction is visible.  The European Association of Personality Psychology recently held a special three-day meeting on the topic, to result in a set of published recommendations for improved research practice, a well-financed conference in Santa Barbara in October will address the “decline effect” (the mysterious tendency of research findings to fade away over time), and the President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology was recently motivated to post a message to the membership expressing official concern.  These are just three reactions that I personally happen to be familiar with; I’ve also heard that other scientific organizations and even agencies of the federal government are looking into this issue, one way or another.

This burst of concern and activity might seem to be unjustified.  After all, literally making your data up is a far cry from practices such as pre-testing, selective reporting, or running multiple statistical tests.  These practices are even, in many cases, useful and legitimate.  So why did they suddenly come under the microscope as a result of cases of data fraud?  The common thread seems to be the issue of replication. Continue reading →