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The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem, says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. “A lot of working scientists assume that if it’s published, it’s right,” he says. “This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.”
Given the smallness of most study samples in social and cognitive psychology and the subtlety of most of the effects that we study, we cannot almost always obtain a significant outcome as the literature appears to suggest. There are surveys in which most psychological researchers admit to making opportunistic decisions in collecting and analyzing data, and in presenting their results.
The results don't surprise me, or maybe there is a small surprise in the almost 40 per cent of experiments whose results can be replicated. In psychology experiments there are frequently many moving parts which makes the job of setting them up again difficult. I have to confess to some pleasure in this meta-study. A part of me wants to celebrate humans resisting reductive scrutiny. Perhaps qualitative research in the social sciences is in the end more valuable than quantitative.
However, two things to add: In order to do anything interesting in psychology, experiments might need to be "out there" somewhat. Who wants to hear about some obvious finding? That degree of difficulty will increase the chance that the next one to try the experiment won't get the dame data. Also, we don't even know (do we?) what the score would be if experiments in a hard science were examined. Psychology was the choice here because it is Brian Nosek's own field of expertise.