In 2016 the Replication Crisis shocked the world of psychology and every year since formerly “classic” studies have been replicated and found to be false. There are many factors that led to the Replication Crisis but the most impactful are 1. nobody does replications and 2. scientific journals don’t publish replications. In response, we have decided to replicate and publish as many studies as we can (some in psychology, some in other fields) over the summer.
Here are a few crucial pieces of information to understand replications and the replication crisis:
1. A replication can be direct or indirect, for most of the replications we do, we want to aim for a direct replication.
a) A direct replication involves reading the text of the original study and copying their methods as exactly as possible.
b) An indirect replication involves reading the text of the original study and taking some creative liberties with the design.
2. The Psychology Replication Crisis is caused by two things:
a) lots of unreplicated studies, and
b) scientists saying “oh geez this is a big problem we ought to have a crisis about it!”
3. There are two problems with unreplicated studies:
a) Methodological problem - science is (in theory) built on the idea that anyone can look at your work, replicate it, and say “this guy was right!” Or “this guy was wrong!” If scientists aren’t doing that, science isn’t what scientists say that it is.
b) Practical problem - in one study (many labs) two thirds of psychology research didn’t replicate, if this is true for all unreplicated science across all fields then there are a lot of falsehoods in science that we don’t have a protocol to notice or correct for.
4. Many other fields (such as education, biology, neuroscience, and medicine) haven’t had a replication crisis yet, even though they have lots of unreplicated studies.
Given all of this our plan is as follows: First we find a spot to live (ideally in Michigan), next we move in, third we start doing studies (our goal is to do seven replications in the first week to get the ball rolling) and we document the whole thing. This will involve a combination of blog and vlog posts, followed by publications of our studies (either on Violet’s blog or on another site).