> Now, after decades of the status quo, psychology is finally coming to terms with the idea that replication is a vital ingredient in the recipe of discovery. The latest issue of the journal Social Psychology reports an impressive 15 papers that attempted to replicate influential findings related to personality and social cognition. Are men really more distressed by infidelity than women? Does pleasant music influence consumer choice? Is there an automatic link between cleanliness and moral judgements? > Several phenomena replicated successfully. An influential finding by Stanley Schacter from 1951 on ‘deviation rejection’ was successfully repeated by Eric Wesselman and colleagues. Schacter had originally found that individuals whose opinions persistently deviate from a group norm tend to be disempowered by the group and socially isolated. Wesselman replicated the result, though finding that it was smaller than originally supposed. > On the other hand, many supposedly ‘classic’ effects could not be found. For instance, there appears to be no evidence that making people feel physically warm promotes social warmth, that asking people to recall immoral behaviour makes the environment seem darker, or for the Romeo and Juliet effect. > The flagship of the special issue is the Many Labs project, a remarkable effort in which 50 psychologists located in 36 labs worldwide collaborated to replicate 13 key findings, across a sample of more than 6000 participants. Ten of the effects replicated successfully. > Adding further credibility to this enterprise, each of the studies reported in the special issue was pre-registered and peer reviewed before the authors collected data. Study pre-registration ensures that researchers adhere to the scientific method and is rapidly emerging as a vital tool for increasing the credibility and reliability of psychological science. > The entire issue is open access and well worth a read. I think Feynman would be glad to see psychology leaving the cargo cult behind and, for that, psychology can be proud too.
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 05:17:21 +0000
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