"A lot of what we think we know about human psychology is bunk," write Russell Warne and Jordan Wagge in the WSJ.
Reproducible experiments are the cornerstone of science. It is not enough that someone has done an experiment and gotten a result. Others need to reproduce the experiment and get the same result. Remember "cold fusion"? It was bunk, and the fact that other researchers could not reproduce it proved it was bunk.
What if a result is announced with great fanfare and nobody bothers to try to reproduce it? That is why so much of what we think we know is bunk, according to Warne and Wagge.
[E]xperimental psychology has a "replication crisis": Too many studies, when repeated, fail to produce the same results.* * *• The most prominent example was a replication of the famous "marshmallow test." The original study, published in 1990, found that children who could delay gratification--defined by not eating a marshmallow in order to get a larger reward later--had higher SAT scores as teenagers. That study has won awards, been featured in textbooks, and even been the topic of sermons. But the replication found a correlation only half as strong--and it disappeared after controlling for demographic variables. The replication is a stronger study, with a sample 10 times as large and more socioeconomically diverse.
The causes of the replication crisis in psychology are complex, but among them is that academia doesn't reward these types of studies with tenure, promotion or grants. Those benefits tend to flow to scholars who come up with exciting new findings, though they may not stand up to scrutiny.
Here's a solution: Enlist students to perform replications as part of scientific training. Almost every undergraduate and graduate student studying psychology must take a course in research methods. They can learn by attempting to replicate earlier studies.
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