Readings
Please note that these are just the starter readings - there are many more!
Estimating the replicability of psychological science
Podcasts and links
Reproducibilitea 4: Reproducibility Now!
- This week we dive into the Open Science Collaboration’s (2015) paper “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
- Psychological Science Editor in Chief D. Stephen Lindsay, Clinical Psychological Science Editor Scott O. Lilienfeld, and APS Fellow Daniel J. Simons explain the rationale for and benefits of preregistration, for researchers and for the field of psychological science at large.
Reproducibilitea Episode 8: The preregistration revolution
- It’s preregistration time! Distinguishing confirmatory (or prediction) and exploratory (or postdiction) analyses. We discuss this awesome paper from Nosek, Ebersole, DeHaven, and Mellor (2018) “The preregistration revolution”. Find the paper here http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/08/1708274114
Essay Topic - Large-scale replication attempts in Psychology
Recently, much attention has been focused on large-scale projects which aim to replicate key findings in Psychology. There are now several of these, including the original Open Science Collaboration project, Many Labs 1, Many Labs 2, Many Labs 3, and now Many Babies. In most cases, fewer than half the original findings were replicated. In this essay, you will discuss the implications of this for the future of psychological research, as well as common criticisms of these types of projects. Starter readings for this essay are in the Topic 4 section.
Some questions to consider:
- What are the benefits of direct compared to conceptual replications?
- What are the underlying reasons that so many studies did not replicate?
- Do some areas have lower rates of replication than others?
- What have been some of the defences of researchers whose results have not replicated?
- As part of Many Labs 2, researchers asked participants to predict which studies would replicate, in a “replication market”. What were the results of this, and what do they tell you?
- Are we wasting our time doing replications when we should just be making our research more replicable?
Forum
After having read the readings and listened to the podcast, what do you think about large-scale replication attempts in psychology? Are you surprised at the studies which failed to replicate? What do you think this means for the future of psychology? Please post your original thoughts below.