52% Yes, a signiicant crisis 3% No, there is no crisis 7% Don't know 38% Yes, a slight crisis 38% Yes, a slight crisis 1,576 RESEARCHERS SURVEYED M ore than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproduc-ibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature. Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology 1 and cancer biology 2 , found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be. " But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. "The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus. "
Although replication is a central tenet of science, direct replications are rare in psychology. This research tested variation in the replicability of thirteen classic and contemporary effects across 36 independent samples totaling 6,344 participants. In the aggregate, ten effects replicated consistently.One effect -imagined contact reducing prejudice -showed weak support for replicability. And two effects -flag priming influencing conservatism and currency priming influencing system justification -did not replicate. We compared whether the conditions such as lab versus online or U.S. versus international sample predicted effect magnitudes. By and large they did not. The results of this small sample of effects suggest that replicability is more dependent on the effect itself than on the sample and setting used to investigate the effect. Word Count = 121 words Many Labs 3 Investigating variation in replicability: A "Many Labs" Replication ProjectReplication is a central tenet of science; its purpose is to confirm the accuracy of empirical findings, clarify the conditions under which an effect can be observed, and estimate the true effect size (Brandt et al., 2013; Open Science Collaboration, 2012. Successful replication of an experiment requires the recreation of the essential conditions of the initial experiment. This is often easier said than done. There may be an enormous number of variables influencing experimental results, and yet only a few tested. In the behavioral sciences, many effects have been observed in one cultural context, but not observed in others. Likewise, individuals within the same society, or even the same individual at different times (Bodenhausen, 1990), may differ in ways that moderate any particular result.Direct replication is infrequent, resulting in a published literature that sustains spurious findings (Ioannidis, 2005) and a lack of identification of the eliciting conditions for an effect. While there are good epistemological reasons for assuming that observed phenomena generalize across individuals and contexts in the absence of contrary evidence, the failure to directly replicate findings is problematic for theoretical and practical reasons. Failure to identify moderators and boundary conditions of an effect may result in overly broad generalizations of true effects across situations (Cesario, 2013) or across individuals (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Similarly, overgeneralization may lead observations made under laboratory observations to be inappropriately extended to ecological contexts that differ in important ways (Henry, MacLeod, Phillips, & Crawford, 2004). Practically, attempts to closely replicate research findings can reveal important differences in what is considered a direct replication (Schimdt, 2009), thus leading to refinements of the initial theory (e.g., Aronson, 1992, Greenwald et al., 1986. Close replication can also lead to Many Labs 4 the clarification of tacit methodological knowledge that is necessary to elicit the effect of interest (Collins,...
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance ( p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion ( p < .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely high-powered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen’s ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Q statistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied.
This article was originally submitted for publication to the Editor of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) in 2015. When the submitted manuscript was subsequently posted online (Silberzahn et al., 2015), it received some media attention, and two of the authors were invited to write a brief commentary in Nature advocating for greater crowdsourcing of data analysis by scientists. This commentary, arguing that crowdsourced research "can balance discussions, validate findings and better inform policy" (Silberzahn & Uhlmann, 2015, p. 189), included a new figure that displayed the analytic teams' effectsize estimates and cited the submitted manuscript as the source of the findings, with a link to the preprint. However, the authors forgot to add a citation of the Nature commentary to the final published version of the AMPPS article or to note that the main findings had been previously publicized via the commentary, the online preprint, research presentations at conferences and universities, and media reports by other people. The authors regret the oversight.
About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-reported stereotypes did not provide additional predictive validity of the achievement gap. We suggest that implicit stereotypes and sex differences in science participation and performance are mutually reinforcing, contributing to the persistent gender gap in science engagement.Implicit Association Test ͉ culture ͉ social psychology ͉ implicit social cognition
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