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A large undertaking to reproduce 21 psychology studies published in Nature and Science came to the same conclusion as the original papers 62 percent of the time, according to a report in Nature Human Behavior today (August 27). When the results of the original and replication experiments agreed, the effect sizes were smaller the second time around, indicating to the authors that both false positives and “inflated effect sizes” are part of the reproducibility problem in the field.
“A false positive result can make other researchers, and the original researcher, spend lots of time and energy and money on results that turn out not to hold,” study coauthor Anna Dreber, an economics professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, tells NPR. “And that’s kind of wasteful for resources and inefficient, so the sooner we find out that a result doesn’t hold, the better.”
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