Psych exam: Study shows there is serious trouble with scientific research
Science
Psych exam: Study shows there is serious trouble with scientific research
Scientific studies about how people act or think can rarely be replicated by outside experts, says a recent study that raised new questions about the seriousness of psychology research. A team of 270 scientists tried reproducing 100 psychology and social science studies that had been published in three top peer-reviewed U.S. journals — just 39 percent came out with same results as the initial reports. The study topics ranged from people’s social lives and interactions with others to research involving perception, attention and memory.
What it does say is that we should be less confident about many of the original experimental results.
Gilbert Chin, psychologist
Problems can arise when scientists cherry-pick their data to include only what is deemed “significant,” or when study sizes are so small that false negatives or false positives arise. University of Oxford professor Dorothy Bishop urged mandatory registration of research methods beforehand to prevent scientists from picking only the most favorable data for analysis, as well as requiring adequate sample sizes and wider reporting of studies that show null results, or in other words, those do not support the hypothesis initially put forward.
A scientific claim doesn’t become believable because of the status or authority of the person that generated it.
Brian Nosek, study co-author
