Can science publishing benefit from the establishment of a stock exchange of sorts?WIKIMEDIA, NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGEThe poor reproducibility dogging psychological science has been well documented in recent months. Now, an international team of researchers—some of whom were the first to sound the alarm regarding the field’s replication problems—suggests that solving the predicament may lie in setting up futures markets in which psychologists acting as traders place bets on whether or not a particular study’s findings will be replicated in future attempts.
“The results show that a collection of knowledgeable peers do have a good sense of what will replicate and what won’t,” Caltech behavioral economist Colin Camerer, who was not involved with the study, told Nature. “This information is in the judgments of peers but has never been collected and quantified until now.”
The study’s findings, published yesterday (November 9) in PNAS, further indicate that psychologists simply asked in isolation to predict which studies are likely to be successfully replicated perform no better than random chance would dictate. But add money and an ability to see where peers are placing their bets, and the quality of those predictions increases significantly. “There is some wisdom of crowds; people have some intuition about which results are true and ...
