But how many of those experiments would produce the same results a second time around?The eye-opening results don't necessarily mean that those original findings were incorrect or that the scientific process is flawed. The only way science is successful and credible is if it is self-critical,” he notes. In the meantime, Christopherson hopes that the massive effort will spur more such double-checks and revisitations of past research to aid the scientific process.“Getting it right means regularly revisiting past assumptions and past results and finding new ways to test them. You have to be temporarily wrong, perhaps many times, before you are ever right.”Across the sciences, research is considered reproducible when an independent team can conduct a published experiment, following the original methods as closely as possible, and get the same results. The project analysis showed that a low P value was fairly predictive of which psychology studies could be replicated. Even today, 100 years after "Scientific evidence does not rely on trusting the authority of the person who made the discovery," team member The Reproducibility Project, a community-based crowdsourcing effort, kicked off in 2011 to test how well this measure of credibility applies to recent research in psychology. Human thought and behavior is a remarkably subtle and ever-changing subject to study, so variations are to be expected when observing diverse populations and participants. Ⓒ 2020 About, Inc. (Dotdash) — All rights reserved Are the Results of Psychology Experiments Hard to Replicate? Their data and results were shared online and reviewed and analyzed by other participating scientists for inclusion in the large To help improve future research, the project analysis attempted to determine which kinds of studies fared the best, and why. In many cases, non-replicated research is caused by differences in the participants or in other extraneous Once a study has been conducted, researchers might be interested in determining if the results hold true in other settings or for other populations. Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. smithsonianmag.com

“Overall, our study shows statistically significant scientific findings should be interpreted rather cautiously until they have been replicated, even if they have been … Of the 100 experiments in question, 61% could not be replicated with the original results.

Any extension or modifications of the original study can be based on current knowledge in the same field. They found that surprising results were the hardest to reproduce, and that the experience or expertise of the scientists who conducted the original experiments had little to do with successful replication.The findings also offered some support for the oft-criticized statistical tool known as theBut Christopherson suspects that most of his co-authors would not want the study to be taken as a ringing endorsement of It's also not yet clear whether psychology might be a particularly difficult field for reproducibility—a similar study is currently underway on cancer biology research. While some might be tempted to look at the results of such replication projects and assume that psychology is rubbish, many suggest that such findings actually help make psychology a stronger science. The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has suggested that because published studies are often too vague in describing methods used, replications should involve the authors of the original studies in order to more carefully mirror the methods and procedures used in the original research. Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter.
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Other studies have been reevaluated for more honest, methodological snafus. It's one key part of the process for building evidence to support theories. Researchers might strive to perfectly reproduce the original study, but variations are expected and often impossible to avoid. In other cases, scientists may want to replicate the experiment to further demonstrate the results. Only 36% of the replicated studies were able to obtain statistically significant results. When replicating earlier researchers, experimenters will follow the same procedures but with a different group of participants. Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author, educational consultant, and speaker focused on helping students learn about psychology.

Two-thirds could not be replicated in other labs.

The replicators worked closely with the original researchers of each study in order to replicate the experiments as closely as possible. Ⓒ 2020 About, Inc. (Dotdash) — All rights reserved So today’s study shouldn’t be seen as an indication that psychology is a less reliable science.

Across the six major replication projects, 90 of 190 findings (47%) have been replicated successfully according to each study’s primary evaluation criterion. “It's impossible to be wrong in a final sense in science. As one might expect, these dismal findings caused quite a stir.