13.4 From the “Replicability Crisis” to Open Science Practices

At the start of this book we discussed the “Many Labs Replication Project,” which failed to replicate the original finding by Simone Schnall and her colleagues that washing one’s hands leads people to view moral transgressions as less wrong (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008)^[1]. Although this project is a good illustration of the collaborative and self-correcting nature of science, it also represents one specific response to psychology’s recent “replicability crisis,” a phrase that refers to the inability of researchers to replicate earlier research findings. Consider for example the results of the Reproducibility Project, which involved over 270 psychologists around the world coordinating their efforts to test the reliability of 100 previously published psychological experiments (Aarts et al., 2015)^[2]. Although 97 of the original 100 studies had found statistically significant effects, only 36 of the replications did! Moreover, even the effect sizes of the replications were, on average, half of those found in the original studies (see Figure 13.5). Of course, a failure to replicate a result by itself does not necessarily discredit the original study as differences in the statistical power, populations sampled, and procedures used, or even the effects of moderating variables could explain the different results (Yong, 2015)^[3].

Although many believe that the failure to replicate research results is an expected characteristic of cumulative scientific progress, others have interpreted this situation as evidence of systematic problems with conventional scholarship in psychology, including a publication bias that favors the discovery and publication of counter-intuitive but statistically significant findings instead of the duller (but incredibly vital) process of replicating previous findings to test their robustness (Aschwanden, 2015^[4]; Frank, 2015^[5]; Pashler & Harris, 2012^[6]; Scherer, 2015^[7]). Worse still is the suggestion that the low replicability of many studies is evidence of the widespread use of questionable research practices by psychological researchers. These may include:

1. The selective deletion of outliers in order to influence (usually by artificially inflating) statistical relationships among the measured variables.
2. The selective reporting of results, cherry-picking only those findings that support one’s hypotheses.
3. Mining the data without an a priori hypothesis, only to claim that a statistically significant result had been originally predicted, a practice referred to as “HARKing” or hypothesizing after the results are known (Kerr, 1998^[8]).
4. A practice colloquially known as “p-hacking” (briefly discussed in the previous section), in which a researcher might perform inferential statistical calculations to see if a result was significant before deciding whether to recruit additional participants and collect more data (Head, Holman, Lanfear, Kahn, & Jennions, 2015)^[9]. As you have learned, the probability of finding a statistically significant result is influenced by the number of participants in the study.
5. Outright fabrication of data (as in the case of Diederik Stapel, described at the start of Chapter 3), although this would be a case of fraud rather than a “research practice.”

It is important to shed light on these questionable research practices to ensure that current and future researchers (such as yourself) understand the damage they wreak to the integrity and reputation of our discipline (see, for example, the “Replication Index,” a statistical “doping test” developed by Ulrich Schimmack in 2014 for estimating the replicability of studies, journals, and even specific researchers). However, in addition to highlighting what not to do, this so-called “crisis” has also highlighted the importance of enhancing scientific rigor by:

1. Designing and conducting studies that have sufficient statistical power, in order to increase the reliability of findings.
2. Publishing both null and significant findings (thereby counteracting the publication bias and reducing the file drawer problem).
3. Describing one’s research designs in sufficient detail to enable other researchers to replicate your study using an identical or at least very similar procedure.
4. Conducting high-quality replications and publishing these results (Brandt et al., 2014)^[10].

One particularly promising response to the replicability crisis has been the emergence of open science practices that increase the transparency and openness of the scientific enterprise. For example, Psychological Science (the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science) and other journals now issue digital badges to researchers who pre-registered their hypotheses and data analysis plans, openly shared their research materials with other researchers (e.g., to enable attempts at replication), or made available their raw data with other researchers (see Figure 13.6).

These initiatives, which have been spearheaded by the Center for Open Science, have led to the development of “Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines” (see Table 13.7) that have since been formally adopted by more than 500 journals and 50 organizations, a list that grows each week. When you add to this the requirements recently imposed by federal funding agencies in Canada (the Tri-Council) and the United States (National Science Foundation) concerning the publication of publicly-funded research in open access journals, it certainly appears that the future of science and psychology will be one that embraces greater “openness” (Nosek et al., 2015)^[11].