SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Remember that study that found that most psychology studies were wrong? Yeah, that study was wrong. That’s the conclusion of four researchers who recently interrogated the methods of that study, which itself interrogated the methods of 100 psychology studies to find that very few could be replicated. (Whoa.) Their damning commentary will be published Friday in the journal Science. (The scientific body that publishes the journal sent Slate an early copy.)

In case you missed the hullabaloo: A key feature of the scientific method is that scientific results should be reproducible—that is, if you run an experiment again, you should get the same results. If you don’t, you’ve got a problem. And a problem is exactly what 270 scientists found last August, when they decided to try to reproduce 100 peer-reviewed journal studies in the field of social psychology. Only around 39 percent of the reproduced studies, they found, came up with similar results to the originals.

That meta-analysis, published in Science by a group called the Open Science Collaboration, led to mass hand-wringing over the “replicability crisis” in psychology. (It wasn’t the first time that the field has faced such criticism, as Michelle N. Meyer and Christopher Chabris have reported in Slate, but this particular study was a doozy.)

Now this new commentary, from Harvard’s Gary King and Daniel Gilbert and the University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson, finds that the OSC study was bogus—for a dazzling array of reasons. I know you’re busy, so let’s examine just two.

The first—which is what tipped researchers off to the study being not-quite-right in the first place—was statistical. The whole scandal, after all, was over the fact that such a low number of the original 100 studies turned out to be reproducible. But when King, a social scientist and statistician, saw the study, he didn’t think the number looked that low. Yeah, I know, 39 percent sounds really low—but it’s about what social scientists should expect, given the fact that errors could occur either in the original studies or the replicas, says King.

Original Submission