An alarming report shows that more than half of psychology studies published in 2008 could not be recreated in a laboratory setting, raising questions about many of the conclusions that were drawn during that time.
It is easy to take what we read in scientific journals as fact, but it is important to remember that the information presented are just the results of experiments carried out by researchers. According to a report from the Smithsonian, not all of the results of published studies can be trusted; a review in the journal Science shows that fewer than half of 100 studies published in 2008 could be successfully reproduced by a new set of researchers.
The study involved 270 scientists from all over the world that tried to replicate other peoples’ research to see if they arrived at the same results. Led by Brian Nosek from the University of Virginia, the study was a part of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology.
The results don’t mean that the original studies’ findings were wrong or that the scientific process was not carried out properly. When a study can’t be replicated, there are many different factors that could influence the outcome of the results.
According to Cody Christopherson from Southern Oregon University, “This project is not evidence that anything is broken. Rather, it’s an example of science doing what science does. It’s impossible to be wrong in a final sense in science. You have to be temporarily wrong, perhaps many times, before you are ever right.”
It wasn’t the study’s goal to prove other scientists wrong, but it does incentivize researchers to perform double checks and scrutinize their work more carefully. Replication is an important part of the scientific process, and recreating studies can reinforce patterns and help lead scientists to more solid conclusions.