Charting the future of social psychology on stormy seas: Winners, losers, and recommendations

Abstract

Social psychology's current crisis has prompted calls for larger samples and more replications. Building on Sakaluk's (in this issue) distinction between exploration and confirmation, I argue that this shift will increase correctness of findings, but at the expense of exploration and discovery. The likely effects on the field include aversion to risk, increased difficulty in building careers and hence more capricious hiring and promotion policies, loss of interdisciplinary influence, and rising interest in small, weak findings. Winners (who stand to gain from the mooted changes) include researchers with the patience and requisite resources to assemble large samples; incompetent experimenters; destructive iconoclasts; competing subfields of psychology; and lower-ranked journals, insofar as they publish creative work with small samples. The losers are young researchers; writers of literature reviews and textbooks; flamboyant, creative researchers with lesser levels of patience; and researchers at small colleges. My position is that the field has actually done quite well in recent decades, and improvement should be undertaken as further refinement of a successful approach, in contrast to the Cassandrian view that the field's body of knowledge is hopelessly flawed and radical, revolutionary change is needed. I recommend we retain the exploratory research approach alongside the new, large-sample confirmatory work.