Showing posts with label Golonka & Wilson (2012). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Golonka & Wilson (2012). Show all posts

Thursday, 7 November 2013

Replication will not save psychology

"Replication is our only hope." "No. There is another"
Psychology is big into replication these days. A lot of people think that a major problem with the field is that many important results have not been replicated, and that this is in part because journals don't like to publish replications (not original or sexy enough). 

I'm all for replication; it's part of good science. But I've never been that into the whole 'replication movement' that's kicking around, and the reason crystallised for me during a 4am baby feed: 


Being able to replicate a study is an effect, not a cause of good scientific practice. So the emphasis on replication as a goal has the whole thing backwards. We should actually be focusing on improving the experiments we run in the first place. If we run better experiments, the replicability will take care of itself.