Reblogged from Ed Young:
Psychologists have been sailing through some pretty troubled waters of late. They’ve faced several cases of fraud, high-profile failures to repeat the results of classic experiments, and debates about commonly used methods that are recipes for sexy but misleading results. The critics, many of whom are psychologists themselves, say that these lines of evidence point towards a “replicability crisis”, where an unknown proportion of the field’s results simply aren’t true.
To address these concerns, a team of scientists from 36 different labs joined together, like some sort of verification Voltron, to replicate 13 experiments from past psychological studies. They chose experiments that were simple and quick to do, and merged them into a single online package that volunteers could finish in just 15 minutes.
They then delivered their experimental smorgasbord to 6,344 people from 36 different groups and 12 different countries.
This is Big Replication—scientific self-correction on a massive scale.