Results Are In From Psychology's Largest Reproducibility Test: 39/100 Reproduced

An anonymous reader writes: A crowd-sourced effort to replicate 100 psychology studies has successfully reproduced findings from 39 of them. Some psychologists say this shows the field has a replicability problem. Others say the results are "not bad at all". The results are nuanced: 24 non-replications had findings at least "moderately similar" to the original paper but which didn't quite reach statistical significance. From the article: "The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem, says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. 'A lot of working scientists assume that if it’s published, it’s right,' he says. 'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.'”

Comments

39/100 is the new passing grade.

[geekmux]

Is there a valid reason we accept studies that have not been reproduced at least one more time to truly vet them before the community?

Logistics, resources, patents, or a need to just plain bullshit people. I'm sure there's plenty of excuses as to why we don't, but doesn't sound like we have a whole lot of good reasons why not.

And those that are labeling a score of 39/100 "not bad at all" should have their head checked. Enjoy your legal fun from that ball of lies.

Re:39/100 is the new passing grade.

[queazocotal]

Funding.
Assuming for the moment that the reproducers were not particularly more skilled than the original scientists, you can't go from '60% not reproduced' to '60% wrong'.

Assuming there is some actual effect being investigated, one reproduction will not get you to 'good' levels of surety about the effect. To hit '95%' - you're going to need likely over ten reproductions.

Re:39/100 is the new passing grade.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please remember that this applies to Psychology, a field that is rife with lots of historical issues (and it is getting better).

In the past, they've practiced thinly veiled religion (Freud, if you don't believe me it's because my unverifiable model explains it, and you are in denial)

They've overstated their findings, to the tune of "and because of this experiment, we can extrapolate that EVERYONE is just the same!" (Stanford experiment, one of the ones with reproduciblity problems too, coincidentally).

They've put up roadblocks to proper scientific evidence gathering (and so this experiment was done before we adopted an ethical code that made verification of its outstanding results, that is reproduciblity, possible, but we are going to believe the conclusions anyway).

It was always called a "soft" Science because that way they could dodge the bullet coming from the real Sciences. However, when you read some of their works (especially their older works) you begin to see a pattern. They come from a history that probably poised them to have a long and hard road to understanding much of what we really do. In their defense they were attempting to build a model of the "mind" which is something that they assumed existed in a particular way, but didn't really test (it took a long time for Turing to come around). Finally, they are burdened with a lot of thinking that doesn't meet Philosophical rigor, because they shore it up with testing that doesn't meet Scientific rigor.

I'm glad to see the new wave of Psychology coming through. The now base a lot of their findings on biochemical analysis and stronger testing (including better attention to controls and double blind testing, which to their credit, they invented). It's just disheartening that the field lacks respect in other ways because in every intro to Psychology class they keep pushing the sensational "Dogma" experiments as facts when in reality they often fail to reproduce the results.

Re:39/100 is the new passing grade.

[bondsbw]

Many sciences, not just the ones you listed, have at least some problem with reproducibility. Verification isn't nearly as sexy as coming up with a new idea.

During my academic days, all the focus was on new work and literature reviews, but only one professor seemed to (defeatedly) care about verifying the results of other researchers. That doesn't get the funding.

Re:39/100 is the new passing grade.

[rockmuelle]

Gah. I have mod points but want to add to this conversation.

The point of publishing is to share results of an experiment or study. Basically, a scientific publication tells the audience what the scientist was studying, how they did the experiment, what they found, and what they learned from it. The point of peer review is to review the work to make sure appropriate methods were followed and that the general results agree with the data. Peer review is not meant to verify or reproduce the results, but rather just make sure that the methods were sound.

Scientific papers are _incremental_ and meant to add to the body of knowledge. It's important to know that papers are never the last word on a subject and the results may not be reproducible. It's up to the community to determine which results are important enough to warrant reproduction. It's also up to the community to read papers in the context of newly acquired knowledge. An active researcher in any field can quickly scan old papers and know which ones are likely no-longer relevant.

That said, there is a popular belief that once something is published, it is irrefutable truth. That's a problem with how society interacts with science. No practicing scientist believes any individual paper is the gospel truth on a topic.

The main problem in science that this study highlights is not that papers are difficult to reproduce (that's expected by how science works), but that some (most?) fields currently allow large areas of research to move forward fairly unchecked. In the rush to publish novel results and cover a broad area, no one goes back to make sure the previous results hold up. Thus, we end up with situations where there are a lot of topics that should be explored more deeply but aren't due to the pursuit of novelty.

If journals encouraged more follow-up and incremental papers, this problem would resolve itself. Once a paper is published, there's almost always follow-up work to see how well the results really hold up. But, publishing that work is more difficult and doesn't help advance a career, especially if the original paper was not yours, so the follow-up work rarely gets done.

tl;dr: for the general public, it's important to understand that the point of publishing is to share work, peer review just makes sure the work was done properly and makes no claims on correctness, and science is fluid. For scientists, yeah, there are some issues with the constant quest for novel publications vs. incremental work.

-Chris

Re:39/100 is the new passing grade.

[amicusNYCL]

I think that there is a bit of a disconnect between scientific methods and things like psychology. I think it stems from the fact that it's easy to set up a thermometer, or an EKG, or whatever else and get those discrete data points, but it's difficult to measure things like "I feel better" or "I don't think about that the same way." I have a few friends who would swear up and down that EMDR therapy helped them out tremendously, but I don't know if there's a single way to gather data that would actually quantify what happened to them. I see the results not so much as psychology being flawed, but more about the difficulty of simply gathering the type of quantified data that a scientific study would require.

false positives

[jc42]

'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.'

An even more widespread problem is that there are a lot of true negatives that aren't in the literature.

Of course, this is a problem in most scientific fields, not just the "soft sciences" like psychology. I'm occasionally impressed by a researcher who publishes descriptions of things studied and found to be not significant, but this doesn't happen very often.

Obg. XKCD

[Reaper9889]

I think it could have something to do with this XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/882/

God bless him...

[Karmashock]

I had despaired that psychology could ever pull its head out of his own ass. But if they start actually doing real science again then the field might actually be saved.

It had gotten so bad that I just assumed that the neurologists would have to deal with all this stuff from the other side. Answer the psychology questions with neurology science.

Psychology has become something of a joke lately and there is no way to fix it short of subjecting it to cold empirical science.