2016 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 3-14
Psychological science is now facing an unprecedented crisis of reproducibility. The field is becoming aware of the systematic problems embedded in its research practices that have been widely employed by most academic journals. An emphasis on aesthetic rather than scientific standards has led to a publication bias for positive results, which, in turn, has encouraged questionable research practices (QRPs), such as p-hacking and HARKing. These processes have potentially created “null fields” where many findings are mere products of false positives. This risk is especially large in fields where the prior probability of the hypotheses being true is low. In fact, a recent large-scale replication project reported that the reproducibility of psychological literature is less than 40%. The psychology community is starting to respond to this crisis by becoming aware of the importance of pre-registered replication, and by reforming the publication standards of many journals. In this paper, we provide an overview of the facts and solutions to the present problems.
