Abstract
The (latest) crisis in confidence in social psychology has generated much heated discussion about the importance of replication, including how it should be carried out as well as interpreted by scholars in the field. For example, what does it mean if a replication attempt “fails”—does it mean that the original results, or the theory that predicted them, have been falsified? And how should “failed” replications affect our belief in the validity of the original research? In this paper, we consider the replication debate from a historical and philosophical perspective, and provide a conceptual analysis of both replication and falsification as they pertain to this important discussion. Along the way, we highlight the importance of auxiliary assumptions (for both testing theories and attempting replications), and introduce a Bayesian framework for assessing “failed” replications in terms of how they should affect our confidence in original findings.
Highlights
Scientists pay lip-service to the importance of replication
If replication is so important, why isn’t it being done? This question has become a source of crisis-level anxiety among psychologists in recent years, as we explore in a later section
We suggested that replications could be more or less informative; and we discuss some strategies for making them “more” rather than “less.” We begin with a discussion of “direct” vs. “conceptual” replication
Summary
Scientists pay lip-service to the importance of replication. It is the “coin of the scientific realm” (Loscalzo, 2012, p. 1211); “one of the central issues in any empirical science” (Schmidt, 2009, p. 90); or even the “demarcation criterion between science and nonscience” (Braude, 1979, p. 2). If we cannot be sure that our finding is reliable to begin with (because it turns out to have been a coincidence, or else a false alarm due to questionable research practices, publication bias, or fraud), we are in no position to begin testing the theory by which it is supposedly explained (Cartwright, 1991; see Earp et al, 2014) Both types of replication are important, and there is no absolute line between them. We might invoke what Meehl (1990b) termed the ceteris paribus (all else equal) assumption This idea, applied to the issue of direct replications, suggests that for researchers to be confident that a replication attempt is a valid one, the auxiliary assumptions in the replication have to be sufficiently similar to those in the original experiment that any differences in findings cannot reasonably be attributed to differences in the assumptions. Our argument is that replications (of sufficient quality) are informative
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