London - Psychology has long been the butt of jokes - especially from academics working in “hard” sciences such as physics - and now a study has revealed that much of its published research really is psycho-babble.
More than half of the findings from 100 different studies published in leading, peer-reviewed psychology journals cannot be reproduced by other researchers who followed the same methods.
A study by more than 270 researchers from around the world has found that just 39 percent of the claims made in psychology papers published in three prominent journals could be reproduced unambiguously - and even then they were found to be less significant statistically than the original findings.
The research includes studies into what factors influence choice of romantic partners, whether peoples' ability to identify an object is slowed if it is wrongly labelled, and whether people show racial bias when asked to identify different kinds of weapons.
The researchers who carried out the work, published in the journal Science, said that reproducibility is the essence of the scientific method.
“Scientific evidence does not rely on trusting the authority of the person who made the discovery. Rather, credibility accumulates through independent replication and elaboration of the ideas and evidence,” said Angela Attwood, professor of psychology at Bristol University, who was part of the project. There is growing concern about the reproducibility of scientific findings, especially in the medical journals where there is great emphasis on “evidence-based” medicine. The levels of statistical significance needed in some fields of research, such as particle physics, are much higher for instance than those employed in “softer” fields such as psychology and medicine.
“For years there has been concern about the reproducibility of scientific findings, but little direct, systematic evidence. This project is the first of its kind and adds substantial evidence that the concerns are real and addressable,” said Brian Nosek, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who led the study.
The researchers found that some of the attempted replications even produced the opposite effect to the one originally reported. Many psychological associations and journals are not trying to improve reproducibility and openness, the researchers said.
The Independent