Over the last four years (Unkelbach, 2013(Unkelbach, -2015, I used the editorials to keep readers updated on the proceedings behind the scenes, to inform about important changes, and to provide authors with information about impact and turnaround rates. From this informational perspective, this will be an atypical editorial, as I will almost solely address how Social Psychology as a journal might contribute to a better social psychological science by increasing the replicability of the results published within our pages. This is a somewhat personal view, but informed by recent publications on the topic and by the experiences as Editor-in-Chief of Social Psychology.
Replicable Social Psychological ScienceIn October 2015, Brian Nosek and 270 contributing authors published an article in Science (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) that attempted to replicate 100 psychological experiments from high-profile outlets. This article had its predecessor in Social Psychology with our Registered Reports Special Issue on replications (Nosek & Lakens, 2014); in this special issue, authors preregistered their replication attempts of classic and contemporary findings. Some classic findings replicated (e.g., Wesselmann et al., 2014), while others did not (Nauts, Langner, Huijsmans, Vonk, & Wigboldus, 2014), and there was a lively debate captured in the comments on this issue and the respective rejoinders (e.g., Monin & Oppenheimer, 2014;Schwarz & Strack, 2014). The recent 100 experiments Science article used only published experiments from 2008. It came up with a rate of 36 significant results in the direction of the original findings. The debate about the implications of the specific numbers and the reasons for successes and failures of these attempts has taken place elsewhere (see, e.g., Maxwell, Lau, & Howard, 2015;Stroebe & Strack, 2014). Yet, a trend is visible: published psychological experiments seem to be not easy to replicate. In the following, I want to discuss how we might increase replicability of research results published in Social Psychology.