Category: Replications

Cognition, Memory, Methods, Perception, Replications June 5, 2017

These nine cognitive psychology findings all passed a stringent test of their replicability

Abstract brain gear — “These results represent good news for the field of psychology”

The failure to reproduce established psychology findings on renewed testing, including some famous effects, has been well-publicised and has led to talk of a crisis in the field. However, psychology is a vast topic and there’s a possibility that the findings from some sub-disciplines may be more robust than others, in the sense of replicating reliably, even in unfavourable circumstances, such as when the participants have been tested on the same effect before.

A new paper currently available as a preprint at PsyArXiv has tested whether this might be the case for nine key findings from cognitive psychology, related to perception, memory and learning. Rolf Zwaan at Erasumus University Rotterdam and his colleagues found that all nine effects replicated reliably. “These results represent good news for the field of psychology,” they said.

Continue reading “These nine cognitive psychology findings all passed a stringent test of their replicability” →

Methods, Replications, Social May 25, 2017May 26, 2017

Was the “crisis” in social psychology really that bad? Have things improved? Part One: the researchers’ perspective

By Alex Fradera

The field of social psychology is reeling from a series of crises that call into question the everyday scientific practices of its researchers. The fuse was lit by statistician John Ioannidis in 2005, in a review that outlined why, thanks particularly to what are now termed “questionable research practices” (QRPs), over half of all published research in social and medical sciences might be invalid. Kaboom. This shook a large swathe of science, but the fires continue to burn especially fiercely in the fields of social and personality psychology, which marshalled its response through a 2012 special issue in Perspectives on Psychological Science that brought these concerns fully out in the open, discussing replication failure, publication biases, and how to reshape incentives to improve the field. The fire flared up again in 2015 with the publication of Brian Nosek and the Open Science Collaboration’s high-profile attempt to replicate 100 studies in these fields, which succeeded in only 36 per cent of cases. Meanwhile, and to its credit, efforts to institute better safeguards like registered reports have gathered pace.

So how bad did things get, and have they really improved? A new article in pre-print at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology tries to tackle the issue from two angles: first by asking active researchers what they think of the past and present state of their field, and how they now go about conducting psychology experiments, and second by analysing features of published research to estimate the prevalence of broken practices more objectively.

The paper comes from a large group of authors at the University of Illinois at Chicago under the guidance of Linda Skitka, a distinguished social psychologist who participated in the creation of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science and who is on the editorial board of many more social psych journals, and led by Matt Motyl, a social and personality psychologist who has published with Nosek in the past, including on the issue of improving scientific practice.

Psychology research is the air that we breathe at the Digest, making it crucial that we understand its quality. So in this two-part series, we’re going to explore the issues raised in the University of Illinois at Chicago paper, to see if we can make sense of the state of social psychology, beginning in this post with the findings from Motyl et al’s survey of approximately 1,200 social and personality psychologists, from graduate students to full professors, mainly from the US, Europe and Australasia.

Continue reading “Was the “crisis” in social psychology really that bad? Have things improved? Part One: the researchers’ perspective” →

Methods, Personality, Replications April 10, 2017April 10, 2017

Personality differences uncovered between students at different US universities

GettyImages-587964230 — *Students at more expensive institutions tended to score higher in trait Neuroticism*

By Christian Jarrett

Psychology is overly dependent on student samples, but on the plus side, you might assume that one advantage of comparing across student samples is that you can rule out the influence of complicating background factors, such as differences in average personality profile. In fact, writing in the Journal of Personality, a team of US researchers led by Katherine Corker at Kenyon College has challenged this assumption: their findings suggest that if you test a group of students at one university, it’s not safe to assume that their average personality profile will match that of a sample of students from a university elsewhere in the same country.

Continue reading “Personality differences uncovered between students at different US universities” →

Methods, Replications January 13, 2017

Replication success correlates with researcher expertise (but not for the reasons you might think)

By Christian Jarrett

During the ongoing “replication crisis” in psychology, in which new attempts to reproduce previously published results have frequently failed, a common claim by the authors of the original work has been that those attempting a replication have lacked sufficient experimental expertise. Part of their argument, as explained recently by Shane Bench and his colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is that “just as master chess players and seasoned firefighters develop intuitive expertise that aids their decision making, seasoned experimenters may develop intuitive expertise that influences the ‘micro decisions’ they make about study selection … and data collection.”

To see if there really is any link between researcher expertise and the chances of replication success, Bench and his colleagues have analysed the results of the recent “Reproducibility Project” in which 270 psychologists attempted to replicate 100 previous studies, managing a success rate of less than 40 per cent. Bench’s team found that replication researcher team expertise, as measured by first and senior author’s number of prior publications, was indeed correlated with the size of effect obtained in the replication attempt, but there’s more to the story.

Continue reading “Replication success correlates with researcher expertise (but not for the reasons you might think)” →

evolutionary psych, Replications, Sex December 12, 2016January 4, 2017

Wardrobe malfunction – three failed attempts to replicate the finding that red increases attractiveness

By Christian Jarrett

It’s one of the simplest, most evidence-backed pieces of advice you can give to someone who’s looking to attract a partner – wear red. Many studies, most of them involving men rating women’s appearance, have shown that wearing red clothing increases attractiveness and sex appeal. The reasons are thought to be traceable to our evolutionary past – red displays in the animal kingdom also often indicate sexual interest and availability – complemented by the cultural connotations of red with passion and sex.

But nothing, it seems, is straightforward in psychology any more. A team of Dutch and British researchers has just published three attempts to replicate the red effect in the open-access journal Evolutionary Psychology, including testing whether the effect is more pronounced in a short-term mating context, which would be consistent with the idea that red signals sexual availability. However, not only did the research not uncover an effect of mating context, all three experiments also failed to demonstrate any effect of red on attractiveness whatsoever. Continue reading “Wardrobe malfunction – three failed attempts to replicate the finding that red increases attractiveness” →

Cognition, Emotion, Reading, Replications October 19, 2016November 1, 2016

Three labs just failed to replicate the finding that a quick read of literary fiction boosts your empathy

By Alex Fradera

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” So said Joyce Carol Oates, and many more of us suspect that reading good fiction gives us insight into other people.

Past research backs this up, for example providing evidence that people with a long history of reading tend to be better at judging the mental states of others. But this work has always been open to the explanation that sensitive people are drawn to books, rather than books making people more sensitive. However in 2013 a study came along that appeared to change the game: researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano showed that exposure to a single passage of literary fiction actually improved readers’ ability to identify other people’s feelings.

This finding sent ripples through popular media, even prompting some to suggest strategies for everyday life like leafing through a book before you go on a date. But since then, as is the usual pattern in psychology these days, a struggle has ensued to establish the robustness of the eye-catching 2013 result. Continue reading “Three labs just failed to replicate the finding that a quick read of literary fiction boosts your empathy” →

Feature, Replications September 16, 2016April 21, 2017

Ten Famous Psychology Findings That It’s Been Difficult To Replicate

By Christian Jarrett

Every now and again a psychology finding is published that immediately grabs the world’s attention and refuses to let go – often it’s a result with immediate implications for how we can live more happily and peacefully, or it says something profound about human nature. Said finding then enters the public consciousness, endlessly recycled in pop psychology books and magazine articles.

Unfortunately, sometimes when other researchers have attempted to obtain these same influential findings, they’ve struggled. This replication problem doesn’t just apply to famous findings, nor does it only affect psychological science. And there can be relatively mundane reasons behind failed replications, such as methodological differences from the original or cultural changes since the original was conducted.

But given the public fascination with psychology, and the powerful influence of certain results, it is arguably in the public interest to summarise in one place a collection of some of the most famous findings that have proven tricky to repeat. This is not a list of disproven or dodgy results. It’s a snapshot of the difficult, messy process of behavioural science. Continue reading “Ten Famous Psychology Findings That It’s Been Difficult To Replicate” →

Emotion, Faces, Methods, Replications September 1, 2016September 1, 2016

No reason to smile – Another modern psychology classic has failed to replicate

25401359824_3f753aaf04_o — Image via Quentin Gronau/Flickr showing how participants were instructed to hold the pen

By Christian Jarrett

The great American psychologist William James proposed that bodily sensations – a thumping heart, a sweaty palm – aren’t merely a consequence of our emotions, but may actually cause them. In his famous example, when you see a bear and your pulse races and you start running, it’s the running and the racing pulse that makes you feel afraid.

Consistent with James’ theory (and similar ideas put forward even earlier by Charles Darwin), a lot of research has shown that the expression on our face seems not only to reflect, but also to shape how we’re feeling. One of the most well-known and highly cited pieces of research to support the “facial feedback hypothesis” was published in 1988 and involved participants looking at cartoons while holding a pen either between their teeth, forcing them to smile, or between their lips, forcing them to pout. Those in the smile condition said they found the cartoons funnier.

But now an attempt to replicate this modern classic of psychology research, involving 17 labs around the world and a collective subject pool of 1894 students, has failed. “Overall, the results were inconsistent with the original result,” the researchers said. Continue reading “No reason to smile – Another modern psychology classic has failed to replicate” →

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