From Clearer Thinking: “The field of academic psychology has been going through a ‘replication crisis’ for the last decade or so. Many things we thought we knew about human psychology from past research turn out to not be supported by the data when we test for those effects again. One attempt to replicate 100 studies that were published in prominent psychology journals in 2008 found that 40 of the 100 original studies did not replicate. Other replication efforts in psychology have found similar results.
This seems like pretty bad news. After all, research findings in psychology are used in ways that have a profound impact on people’s lives. What if roughly half of the things we’ve been basing those decisions on just aren’t true? How can you know what research to trust if a lot of it doesn’t hold up in subsequent testing? We’re putting forward a new approach designed to improve this situation.”
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