The scientific quality of social and personality psychology has been debated at great length in recent years. Despite research on the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) and the replicability of particular findings, the impact of the current discussion on research practices is unknown. The current studies examine whether and how practices have changed, if at all, over the last 10 years. In Study 1, we surveyed 1,166 social and personality psychologists about how the current debate has affected their perceptions of their own and the field's research practices. In Study 2, we coded the research practices and critical test statistics from social and personality psychology articles published in 2003-2004 and 2013-2014. Together, these studies suggest that (a) perceptions of the current state of the field are more pessimistic than optimistic; (b) the discussion has increased researchers' intentions to avoid QRPs and adopt proposed best practices, (c) the estimated replicability of research published in 2003-2004 may not be as bad as many feared, and (d) research published in 2013-2014 shows some improvement over research published in 2003-2004, a result that suggests the field is evolving in a positive direction. (PsycINFO Database Record

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In response to the replication crisis, many psychologists recommended that the field adopt several proposed reforms to research practices, such as preregistration, to make research more replicable. However, how researchers have received these proposals is not well known because, to our knowledge, no systematic investigation into use of these reforms has been conducted. We wanted to learn about the rationales researchers have for not adopting the proposed reforms. We analyzed survey data of 1,035 researchers in social and personality psychology who were asked to indicate whether they thought it was acceptable to not follow four specific proposed reforms and to explain their reasoning when they thought it was acceptable to not adopt these reforms. The four reforms were preregistering hypotheses and methods, making data publicly available online, conducting formal power analyses, and reporting effect sizes. Our results suggest that (a) researchers have adopted some of the proposed reforms (e.g., reporting effect sizes) more than others (e.g., preregistering studies) and (b) rationales for not adopting them reflect a need for more discussion and education about their utility and feasibility.

The target article makes the important case for making replicability mainstream. Yet, their proposal targets a symptom, rather than the underlying cause of low replication rates. We argue that psychological scientists need to devise stronger theories that are more clearly falsifiable. Without strong, falsifiable theories in the original research, attempts to replicate the original research are nigh uninterpretable.

Deviance Punishment is an important issue for social-psychological research. Group members tend to punish deviance through rejection, ostracism and – more commonly – negative judgments. Subjective Group Dynamics proposes to account for social judgement patterns of deviant and conformist individuals. Relying on a group identity management perspective, one of the model’s core predictions is that the judgment of a deviant target depends on group membership. More specifically, the model predicts that deviant ingroup members should be judged more negatively than outgroup ones. Although this effect has been repeatedly observed over the past decades, there is a current lack of sufficiently powered studies in the literature. For the first time, we conducted tests of Subjective Group Dynamics in France and the US to investigate whether ingroup deviants were judged more harshly than outgroup ones. Across six experiments and an internal mini meta-analysis, we observed no substantial difference in judgment between ingroup and outgroup deviant targets, d = -0.01, 95% CI[-0.07, 0.06]. The findings’ implications for deviance management research are discussed.