Researchers’ Perceptions of the State of Social and Personality Psychology

Abstract

We investigate social and personality psychology researchers’ perceptions of the state of the field and of the published literature. To explore how researchers perceive the field to have changed over time, we compare their retrospective perceptions of articles published in 2010, just before the advent of the replication crisis, to their perceptions of articles published a decade later. We also examine researchers’ perceptions of their own work, what qualities they consider important when evaluating research quality, and explore individual differences among researchers’ perceptions. Overall, these findings indicate that researchers in our sample perceive the quality of the published literature to have improved in many ways over the last decade, but perceptions of even the recent literature are mixed. We also identify specific improvements that researchers believe have been made, and what weaknesses they believe remain.