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A large-scale effort to repeat psychological experiments has failed to confirm the results about half the time, according to a study published yesterday (November 19) on the pre-print server PsyArXiv and scheduled for publication in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. According to the manuscript, the failures were not due to differences in the study populations between the original experiments and the replications, Nature reports.
“Those [replication efforts] that failed tended to fail everywhere,” Brian Nosek, who led the study and is the executive director of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, tells Nature.
In the study, known as Many Labs 2, 28 classic and contemporary psychology experiments were repeated by 60 labs in 36 countries and territories. For example, they successfully replicated a 1981 study by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University about framing effects, or how people react differently to ...
