From: deputydog23x@gmail.com   
      
   Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results > Of   
   100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social   
   psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication   
   test   
      
   Psychology    
      
   Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results    
      
      
   Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social   
   psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication   
   test    
      
   Psychology experiments are failing the replication test - for good reason    
      
    There are many reasons why an experiment might fail to replicate, but more   
   than this, the study has highlighted some issues with academic publishing and   
   modern science.    
    There are many reasons why an experiment might fail to replicate, but more   
   than this, the study has highlighted some issues with academic publishing and   
   modern science.    
      
      
   Photograph: Pere Sanz / Alamy/Alamy    
   Ian Sample Science editor    
   @iansample    
      
      
   Thursday 27 August 2015 14.00 EDT Last modified on Friday 28 August 2015 08.50   
   EDT    
      
      
   A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research   
   journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science.    
      
   An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top   
   psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original   
   findings.    
      
   The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was   
   launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the   
   reliability of psychology research.    
      
   The first imperative: Science that isn't transparent isn't science    
   "There is no doubt that I would have loved for the effects to be more   
   reproducible," said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology who led the study   
   at the University of Virgina. "I am disappointed, in the sense that I think we   
   can do better."    
      
   "The key caution that an average reader should take away is any one study is   
   not going to be the last word," he added. "Science is a process of uncertainty   
   reduction, and no one study is almost ever a definitive result on its own."    
      
   All of the experiments the scientists repeated appeared in top ranking   
   journals in 2008 and fell into two broad categories, namely cognitive and   
   social psychology. Cognitive psychology is concerned with basic operations of   
   the mind, and studies tend to    
   look at areas such as perception, attention and memory. Social psychology   
   looks at more social issues, such as self esteem, identity, prejudice and how   
   people interact.    
      
   In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were   
   not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when   
   other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology   
   studies failed the same    
   test. Details are published in the journal Science.    
      
   Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the   
   effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around.   
   That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their   
   hypotheses, and by journals    
   accepting only the strongest claims for publication.    
      
   Despite the grim findings, Nosek said the results presented an opportunity to   
   understand and fix the problem. "Scepticism is a core part of science and we   
   need to embrace it. If the evidence is tentative, you should be sceptical of   
   your evidence. We    
   should be our own worst critics," he told the Guardian. One initiative now   
   underway calls for psychologists to submit their research questions and   
   proposed methods to probe them for review before they start their experiments.    
      
   John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford   
   University, said the study was impressive and that its results had been   
   eagerly awaited by the scientific community. "Sadly, the picture it paints - a   
   64% failure rate even among papers    
   published in the best journals in the field - is not very nice about the   
   current status of psychological science in general, and for fields like social   
   psychology it is just devastating," he said.    
      
   But he urged people to focus on the positives. The results, he hopes, will   
   improve research practices in psychology and across the sciences more   
   generally, where similar problems of reproducibility have been found before.   
   In 2005, Ioannidis published a    
   seminal study that explained why most published research findings are false.    
      
   Marcus Munafo, a co-author on the study and professor of psychology at Bristol   
   University, said: "I think it's a problem across the board, because wherever   
   people have looked, they have found similar issues." In 2013, he published a   
   report with Ioannidis    
   that found serious statistical weaknesses were common in neuroscience studies.    
      
   Scandals prompt return to peer review and reproducible experiments    
   Nosek's study is unlikely to boost morale among psychologists, but the   
   findings simply reflect how science works. In trying to understand how the   
   world works, scientists must ask important questions and take risks in finding   
   ways to try and answer them.    
   Missteps are inevitable if scientists are not being complacent. As Alan Kraut   
   at the Association for Psychological Science puts it: "The only finding that   
   will replicate 100% of the time is likely to be trite, boring and probably   
   already known: yes, dead    
   people can never be taught to read."    
      
   There are many reasons why a study might not replicate. Scientists could use a   
   slightly different method second time around, or perform the experiment under   
   different conditions. They might fail to find the original effect by chance.   
   None of these would    
   negate the original finding. Another possibility is that the original result   
   was a false positive.    
      
   Among the experiments that stood up was one that found people are equally   
   adept at recognising pride in faces from different cultures. Another backed up   
   a finding that revealed the brain regions activated when people were given   
   fair offers in a financial    
   game. One study that failed replication claimed that encouraging people to   
   believe there was no such thing as free will made them cheat more.    
      
      
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