Psychology isn’t the only science with reproducibility problem

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. 

A large collaborative science initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that only about one in three studies could be replicated. The results were rapidly disseminated in mainstream and social media with most commentators concluding that psychological science shouldn’t be called a science at all.

Yet, reproducibility failure is common across many scientific disciplines, not just psychological science. For example, the pharmaceutical company Bayer recently reported that it failed to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets.

In her recent New York Times essay, Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett describes replication failures in genetics and physics as well as psychological science that led to marked progress in these fields. Nor is replication failure a modern phenomenon. Scientific American blogger Jared Horvath describes three famous replication failure cases from the history of science involving the work of such giants as Galileo, John Dalton and Robert Millikan. Science proceeds by fits and starts, and replication failures don’t necessarily spell doom for a scientific endeavor. Instead, they point to refinements that must be made in theory and methods.

If other sciences also “suffer from a replication crisis,” why then, one wonders, is psychological science singled out for censure? I believe the answer lies in the discomfort we feel from the very idea that the mysteries of human nature can be studied scientifically.

Read full, original post: Psychological studies can’t always be reproduced, and that’s OK

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